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Yay! More centralisation!
(lemm.ee)
transcript
A picture of the Ben Affleck Smoking meme, with the caption "Me seeing people on reddit telling other people to go to lemmy.world"
The cold truth is that to onboard people in greater numbers you need a default instance recommendation. You just do. You absolutely cannot ask potential new users (many of which will - hopefully - be casual and not so tech savvy) to sit down and undertake a multi hour research project into finding an appropriate small instance for them. You cannot reasonably expect people to look into uptime, funding and defederation lists to make an informed decision about where to register. You just need them through the door and posting and commenting and voting.
Making a new account somewhere else is super easy and painless once they're already here. We just need to get them here.
It's too bad there isn't a way to just have one location for everyone to create an account, like a lemmy.com, and then the last step during account creationg is to select your preferred instance for the account, maybe from like a drop down list that has a small blurb about the rules and expectations for that instance and a list of top 10 hosted communities, and maybe even a random choice option, and then you can go back to that main area to switch your instance later if need be.
When I first found Lemmy, it was through https://join-lemmy.org/ which is similar to what you are describing.
Though it recommended me to join lemmy.ml, and apparently it's a controversial one, so I don't know if that worked out well...
That's how I got in! Lemm.ee does just fine.
But yea, perhaps we could chat to the heads of lemmy.world to maybe pin an announcement to help other instances and help decentralisation. I wouldn't be surprised if they would agree to do that for the greater good.
I think historical data supports they wouldnt agree to stuff for the greater good, but idr that well so I could be wrong
Just tell them to go to your favourite instance. Easy.
Lemm.ee is the default instance new users should use.
That would expose new users to Hexbear, and I don't think new users would stay long after accidentally provoking them with wrongthink and getting spammed with pig testicle pics and insults. That was my experience when I first joined Lemmy and it wasn't pleasant. Lemm.ee's hands-off approach to defederation can be both a blessing and a curse, and I'm not sure it'd be best for new users to be exposed to some of the worst of Lemmy.
I agree as I am one such case. I created an account like a year and a half ago and got so overwhelmed with it I just ignored it. Even the explainer I found was just too much. Finally a couple weeks ago I remembered it given all the Reddit is compromised stuff. I found my login info. I also happened to have had a gummy so I was in the right high mindset to just go down a rabbithole and finally figured it out. I still don't really understand how Lemmy interacts with like Mastodon or Pixelfed etc.