this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Announcements

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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

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This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Do you think 'normies' (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?

[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m an over-50 white Southern lady with no tech skills and I’m loving it. The apps help, and I’m sure I’m missing out on something, but it honestly isn’t that hard to figure out in a general sense.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Great response. Love to see that it is not just us nerds on here!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@VantaWhite @JohnDClay how did you start using Lemmy? Did someone introduced you to? How could you pick the instance where to register?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my case, like so many others, I’m a Reddit refugee. I was mostly a lurker over there, but I spent enough time to know things were going all the wrong ways. They had some good explanations of what Lemmy was and how to use it, and that’s how I got here. Others have pointed out that us old folks were used to Usenet and other similar things so maybe this isn’t all that alien. Also, fuck spez.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@VantaWhite so basically lemmy.world was the default instance for the app you registered your account on?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It was actually the other way around - several of the posts on Reddit about where to go next explicitly mentioned lemmy.world, so I started there. I wandered around for a bit and then looked for apps that offered something similar to the Apollo experience. There are a lot more out there now but Memmy works for me, so that’s where I am.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

One of the things up next on my agenda, is to re-do join-lemmy.org . We have the mockup for it done, I just need to complete it.

Also as someone who grew up before the "use this single US-based site to connect to everything", I don't see how lemmy is too different from older forums. You go to a site, click the signup button, and wait for approval / log in immediately. You don't need to know anything about activitypub, federation, or the fediverse to sign up and start using a lemmy site.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago

I think an already established player like Sync or Boost should provide an experience that hand holds newcomers, by leaving little to guess work.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

For me its already a huge success that Lemmy got where it is today, with over 50k users. If you had told me that a few months ago, I hardly would have believed it. When I started working on Lemmy, there were a couple dozen active users at most, yet the project didnt die. Instead it kept growing and growing steadily. So I think it will keep growing, and there will be more improvements which make Lemmy more accessible for normal users.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sync makes it as simple as any mainsfream social media

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven't tried sync yet, how does new account creation work through their app?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This comment states that they default to lemmy.world. I don't think it should be handled that way.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Which is terrible, it centralizes Lemmy in lemmy.world, they're already facing performance issues because of this.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So this is an ad. An ad for a platform with ads.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Sync is a client app designed to make money either buy being purchased (cool) or by monetizing Lemmy’s content with their own ads. This person is promoting it, hence it is an ad.