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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Nothing to do with TikTok or this generation. Most users find it complicated and insulting them won't change reality. I've learned that the hard way from my years trying to convert people to Linux.
What Lemmy and Mastodon need to do is to have one canonical instance that they manage well themselves. Everyone gets signed up to that initially and those who want to transfer to another instance afterwards can. That alone could have prevented BlueSky taking the lead the way it did.
That's the second big problem hidden in this model: account migration doesn't currently work (nor do I know of an ETA for feature release).
Not to mention the first problem: this heavily promotes centralization which is what caused this whole mess in the first place.
Absolute centralisation caused the mess. My suggestion is just initial centralisation. It lets people get active with the platform while they figure out the basics rather than paralysing them with options up front.
One central server is created. Users finally have an easy time joining lemmy and most are content with staying right where they are. A large amount of content is now centralized to one place. Suddenly, financial interests take notice of a large amount of untapped potential. Caving in to the opportunity to live an easier life under the warm blanket of money, the central server owner sells the server to the highest bidder.
The new central server owner defederates from smaller instances, eventually cutting themselves off from all other lemmy servers. Enshittification begins.
I'm sure there's reasons this couldn't happen but I think the biggest strength of lemmy is having users just randomly pick and then figure it out later. I started out on .world but didn't like their moderation and defederation practices, so I moved.
Maybe you're right, but I think that the issue isn't that everyone was on one server, but there was nowhere for them to go without loosing touch with the people they connect with there. The fediverse can easily give people an out and they can still stay in touch with the people they want.
"I started out on .world but didn't like their moderation and defederation practices, so I moved."
That works for me. But most of us here have been running linux boxes on ARM devices for so long that we have trouble relating to the average user. I met someone recently who makes great contributions to Reddit posts like fact checking and providing digestible research. They're not tech savvy and I doubt we'll ever have the value of their contribution here while things are as complicated as they are up front.
It would be nice if I could use (my name)@(mydomain) and just point (mydomain) at whichever public instance, without having to spool up my own instance.