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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
I think it’s possible – there’s people using email every day all around the world, and really the fediverse isn’t much more complicated than email.
Posted some advice below, but regarding this I’d add: don’t get caught in the weeds of the tech details. Non-tech folks aren’t really interested in federation/ActivityPub, regardless of these being selling points to tech folks.
More important, at least imo, is just pointing them to the instance you’re on and explaining that it can reach a number of other folks.
You might be like, “Hey, so, you’re on Reddit, right? I’m on a similar site called lemmy.fbxl.net, and it’s pretty cool. You can post like you do there but actually reach people across a bunch of other sites instead of just Reddit!” or something like that. Whatever keeps it in terms that don’t get too techy for those that aren’t into that stuff.
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.
