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A picture of the Ben Affleck Smoking meme, with the caption “Me seeing people on reddit telling other people to go to lemmy.world”
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.
Yeah you left out the hours of research to figure out what each instance is actually about and the years of abuse and power trips that have occured under different leadership, and also the dropdown includes defederated instances.
I started on blahaj, but they are NOT an inclusive and healthy LGBTQ community so I had to move but I didn’t want to go through all the effort again so I joined .world
If you thought .world is more LGBTQ friendly than Blahaj you must be smoking the good stuff.
Lemm.ee is the default instance new users should use.
Just tell them to go to your favourite instance. Easy.