The main problem with lemmy now is adoption, there isn’t a critical mass of users yet.
When users see the stats without lemmy.world, they’ll be discouraged from joining. Add to that the issues with federation and the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Lemmy.world is doing great and I’m happy for it and all that, but… 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.
The decentralisation probably doesn’t help either. People coming to Lemmy from other places are coming from a centralised system. That takes some getting used to.
If you’re new to this, you can be forgiven by thinking that all the Lemmy instances are their own separate thing, like the forums of old, rather than that they’re all interconnected (excluding a whole bunch of stuff about defederation and all of that mess).
Oh come on, let’s not pretend that the fediverse is just super intuitive and easy for regular users (i.e. non-techie people). Same ridiculous notion as when people say Linux is just as user-friendly as the more mainstream OSes. It’s sad and I wish it was better but it’s just not right now.
Sorry, but the fact that you’re here means that you are probably in the top percentages of tech-literate people. Especially considering you’re on programming.dev.
You’re severely overestimating the technical literacy of regular people. For many people (maybe even the majority of people) even email is complex.
I never want to mention them explicitly to avoid them getting raided, but there is a community which came here after their sub got banned.
The sub was about an influencer, so definitely not the crowd you would expect on Lemmy.
They are doing just fine. We helped them a bit at first, showed them that there were apps, told them to remember the name of their “server” when logging in.
The community is quite active with over 150 monthly active users. They discuss their topic in their community, everything is going well.
Sometimes I feel like we overestimate the complexity of Lemmy.
That “little more complicated” is asking for a lot, though.
Say you’re coming from Reddit, or Facebook, or something.
It would not be unreasonable to believe that, like Reddit, every single Lemmy instance is its own separate, self-contained site.
And that’s even before figuring out federation works, and how to access things from outside of your instance, or all the nuances that come with defederation and all of that. You made the mistake of joining beehaw? Whoops, all the other “subs” are now inaccessible, because beehaw is not connected to any of the others.
Central places like Reddit don’t have that complexity. Reddit communities are singular, and there’s no overarching layer to complicate things. A community that disagrees with another, and blocks them doesn’t affect your experience as an user.
Lemm.ee is a Reddit alternative. There are apps you can use from https://www.lemmyapps.com/, just remember that your “instance” is lemm.ee. It works similar to Reddit".
That’s it. No federation explanation, no Fediverse jargon. Keep it simple. Also, see my other comment below about an active community of non tech users
How does this argument apply to Lemmy? I get the number of instances could be confusing but you don’t have to know or care about any of that. If you don’t you just land on some registration page and do it. I honestly don’t see how that’s more technical than registering to Reddit, Facebook or Instagram.
The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they’ve developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.
They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I’m not a fan of every decision they make. But they’re creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.
Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project “sucks” should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they’re not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they’ve made and decide that they “suck”.
Yeah, for sure. Doing something great doesn’t shield you from also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions.
I just think it’s good to keep a nuance of language. Too many open source developers burn out, and a hostile community is listed as one of the reasons too often. There will always be disagreements, and there are valid ways of voicing it, but one should never forget that there is humans on the other side and remain kind. :)
They are okay as devs, not that good as admins, which is fine, it is known by now, and people can move easily.
To the people who are going to answer that they are bad devs too, which other devs are that much better than them at this moment for link aggregators in the Fediverse?
I like Piefed and Mbin as much as the next guy, but Lemmy is still the most polished software as of now. Maybe that will change in the future, but let’s face it: with the amount of pushback the Lemmy devs are getting regularly, the fact that most of the instances still use Lemmy is a sign that there the alternatives aren’t that much better.
That’s stupid.
The main problem with lemmy now is adoption, there isn’t a critical mass of users yet.
When users see the stats without lemmy.world, they’ll be discouraged from joining. Add to that the issues with federation and the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
Way to alienate potential users.
Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Lemmy.world is doing great and I’m happy for it and all that, but… 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.
You probably also have the friction been .world and the developers’ Lemmy.
There is also a problem that Lemmy seems to be having problems maintaining a good middle ground of Lemmy servers.
buT mUh DeCenTrAlIZatiOn!
The decentralisation probably doesn’t help either. People coming to Lemmy from other places are coming from a centralised system. That takes some getting used to.
If you’re new to this, you can be forgiven by thinking that all the Lemmy instances are their own separate thing, like the forums of old, rather than that they’re all interconnected (excluding a whole bunch of stuff about defederation and all of that mess).
Nah we’ll keep dropping instances when they hit 20k users.
what steep learning curve? what’s so steep about thinking of social media like email?
Oh come on, let’s not pretend that the fediverse is just super intuitive and easy for regular users (i.e. non-techie people). Same ridiculous notion as when people say Linux is just as user-friendly as the more mainstream OSes. It’s sad and I wish it was better but it’s just not right now.
It might be a little more complicated than normal social media and email but it definitely is not that complex.
Sorry, but the fact that you’re here means that you are probably in the top percentages of tech-literate people. Especially considering you’re on programming.dev.
You’re severely overestimating the technical literacy of regular people. For many people (maybe even the majority of people) even email is complex.
I never want to mention them explicitly to avoid them getting raided, but there is a community which came here after their sub got banned.
The sub was about an influencer, so definitely not the crowd you would expect on Lemmy.
They are doing just fine. We helped them a bit at first, showed them that there were apps, told them to remember the name of their “server” when logging in.
The community is quite active with over 150 monthly active users. They discuss their topic in their community, everything is going well.
Sometimes I feel like we overestimate the complexity of Lemmy.
If they can do it, everybody can do it.
That is a nice success story!
goddam
That “little more complicated” is asking for a lot, though.
Say you’re coming from Reddit, or Facebook, or something.
It would not be unreasonable to believe that, like Reddit, every single Lemmy instance is its own separate, self-contained site.
And that’s even before figuring out federation works, and how to access things from outside of your instance, or all the nuances that come with defederation and all of that. You made the mistake of joining beehaw? Whoops, all the other “subs” are now inaccessible, because beehaw is not connected to any of the others.
Central places like Reddit don’t have that complexity. Reddit communities are singular, and there’s no overarching layer to complicate things. A community that disagrees with another, and blocks them doesn’t affect your experience as an user.
People shouldn’t have suggested you Beehaw.
Nowadays, I just say
That’s it. No federation explanation, no Fediverse jargon. Keep it simple. Also, see my other comment below about an active community of non tech users
How does this argument apply to Lemmy? I get the number of instances could be confusing but you don’t have to know or care about any of that. If you don’t you just land on some registration page and do it. I honestly don’t see how that’s more technical than registering to Reddit, Facebook or Instagram.
The choice of instance is kind of a big barrier though. There’s also a lot of bad UX around discoverability.
There’s a reason why Brazilians went to threads and blue sky and not even considered mastodon.
Talking about Brazil, https://lemmy.eco.br/ is a nice Brazilian Lemmy instance
It’s because the devs suck
The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they’ve developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.
They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I’m not a fan of every decision they make. But they’re creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.
Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project “sucks” should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they’re not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they’ve made and decide that they “suck”.
I mean. They’re torpedoing that open source project’s chances for growth because of their ideology. It’s pretty sucky.
I agree with the rest of your statement regarding the development of Lemmy.
Yeah, for sure. Doing something great doesn’t shield you from also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions.
I just think it’s good to keep a nuance of language. Too many open source developers burn out, and a hostile community is listed as one of the reasons too often. There will always be disagreements, and there are valid ways of voicing it, but one should never forget that there is humans on the other side and remain kind. :)
You have been banned from Lemmy.ml
They are okay as devs, not that good as admins, which is fine, it is known by now, and people can move easily.
To the people who are going to answer that they are bad devs too, which other devs are that much better than them at this moment for link aggregators in the Fediverse?
I like Piefed and Mbin as much as the next guy, but Lemmy is still the most polished software as of now. Maybe that will change in the future, but let’s face it: with the amount of pushback the Lemmy devs are getting regularly, the fact that most of the instances still use Lemmy is a sign that there the alternatives aren’t that much better.
As far as I’m concerned that’s a feature. If we let the normies in then it just turns into Reddit all over again. That slop pile can stay over there.
There’s still room to grow. We could still double the number of active people to 100k and have a wide margin compared to having millions of users