suggestion for guiding new account signups
suggestion for guiding new account signups
First I want to say that I love the idea of Lemmy. I think it's very reminiscent of the old days of BBS's and networked message boards (FIDOnet).
With that in mind I'd like to suggest that maybe some thought should go into guiding people to the right instances to sign up on.
I think more instances should try to specialize in certain content and host communities that cater to that. Much like the BBS's of the olden days you could have an instance that is all about sports, or an instance specializing in comic book communities, or an instance that caters to a certain region or state.
With that in mind, it would be great to have a page that indexes instances by interest groups so people could make better decisions about which instance to join rather than just everyone trying to pile up on lemmy.ml.
Thoughts?
There's a similar idea discussed over here: https://lemmy.world/post/94448
Personally I'm hesitant about topic-themed instances (see my comment there), but there could be arguments for it.
I didn't even see that discussion because I wasnt subbed to asklemmy and I haven't been able to sub to any communities on lemmy.ml for two days now. I can't reply to you there as a result. So while your hesitancy is warranted, you still have the same problem when a place like lemmy.ml hosts the communities you enjoy but then can't handle the load. The end result is the same as it would be if a themed instance was unavailable or suddenly shut down.
Yeah, that's true - .ml seems to be struggling just now. I'm not technically knowledgeable to know what the solution might be, but I did see a suggestion that the hardware they are using isn't really sufficient for the influx they're seeing.
As for the wider issue, it's definitely something that needs discussion and thought. I'm fairly hopeful that time will see things settle into some sort of working system. It's quite exciting to see it all a bit chaotic, but also it does cause frustration!
EDIT - by the way, I hope I didn't come across as being snarky about there already being a discussion, just wanted to let you know about it :-)