I wish we could advertise lemmy.world!
I wish we could advertise lemmy.world!
We are at the cusp of becoming the #1 Lemmy instance, which is very exciting. But I wish there was a better way of informing casual users about lemmy and how easy it is to join and use. I don't think most people need to (or want to) know the intricacies of the Fediverse, but it sounds overwhelming and complicated to them, and as a result they won't even give it a try, when in fact joining lemmy.world to post on c/cats is no more complicated than doing it on r/cats. I wish we could put ads on YouTube, or on on a billboard or something to tell them/show them that! Lemmy (and Fediverse) will only truly be successful if/when the casual users join.
I'm not sure being the biggest instance is a good thing.
The more spread out people are, the healthier the platform.
Every instance is run by volunteers, so they can disappear instantly if the admins decide they don't want to do it anymore. I've seen it happen first-hand to very popular instances. The good thing is that the platform continued to exist so communities just migrated to a different instance (or in my case, I just subbed to a different community)
Fair points. Mentioning lemmy.world was just a little bit of “instance pride”! But my main argument is that the majority of people currently coming to lemmy seem to be tech savvy and/or have already been on fediverse. And leaving the rest of the users behind wont work. Many of the greatest contributors to reddit had non-tech specialties that were valuable for commenting on specific topics (eg law, medicine, civil engineering, etc.). I have been wondering how we can show these people that lemmy is not as terrifyingly complex as they make it sound to be.
Even if in reality it is as easy as opening up a reddit account, for someone like me who likes doing some research beforehand, could be a little tricky. I spent maybe an hour trying to figure out whether a thing such as a best instance exists, so I can open my account there. I did have fun learning about the instances and how the fediverse works, but I'm not sure the majority of people will too.
I do hope lemmy takes off though. It's really cool.
I did have fun learning about the instances and how the fediverse works, but I’m not sure the majority of people will too.
The majority won't (see: fumbled attempts at inviting folks to Mastodon), but that's okay. The trick is to invite them to the instance you're already a part of, no matter how populated.
If you know your friend is more technically inclined and open to deciding between servers/instances, then you might narrow it down to a few familiar instances you think they'd click with and direct them to one of those.
For the vast majority of folks, however, just invite them to your instance. Don't give them choice paralysis by pointing them to a bunch of unfamiliar instances and have them go, "uhhh fuck this i'm out" in a repeat of Mastodon's missteps.