This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Which server do you want to use is like asking "Do you want Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo for email?" it really isn't that big of a deal, but maybe people these days have a hard time doing that too...
People always use the email comparison but it's really not the same, it's more complicated than that. We know it's not too much of a big deal but it is when you don't know what it means to be on a server.
I remember being presented with a choice of servers myself and wondering what on earth it meant, and just wanting to join the "default" one. Ultimately it doesn't matter too much but at the time it feels like a big hurdle.
It's closer to that yes, and you don't really know whar a football team is
While I agree in general, there is a bit more as unlike email... Defederation is a thing.
They don't really need to know about that until they have had time on Lemmy to hear about what those defederated instances actually do
It will definitely impact their experience though, doesn't matter if they know or not imo
If they look at the "all" feed they'll see 90% of the same stuff from 90% of instances.
Once (from experience) they learn what they want from an instance, they can always switch.
...it would be if in your analogy GMail blocks Yahoo because they don't like the politics of their CEO, Outlook blocks both GMail and Yahoo to create a safe space, and you left Protonmail out of the list entirely because almost everyone else is blocking them for not banning users who email the wrong kind of porn to each other.
It's not a big deal until you realize the notion that they all talk to each other is mostly a lie and all the big ones block dozens of instances each. Hell, the threads on the larger instances about whether or not Threads and Truth Social should be defederated if they ever enable federation were some of the highest activity topics on Lemmy for a bit. So was people cheering about Burggit shutting down their lemmy server.
Okay I see now, that's a good deal of nuance.
One more bad analogy, it's like browsing private video game servers.
There's several websites that host lists of Minecraft Servers, some are hidden from those lists due to various reasons.
A federated video game like VR Chat or Minecraft would be incredible. You could probably do that last one with a server plugin.