Hello, Lemmyverse. I’m posting from kbin and crossing my fingers it’ll federate properly.
I’m quite enjoying using this platform as a Reddit replacement so far. But I just wanted to make this post about how federation is presented to the end user. As someone who is tech-inclined, I understand how it works - you can join either local instance communities or ones hosted via another instance by finding it’s URL - but it’s not something you can exactly easily figure out. You have to research and learn how to do it a bit.
I feel like having to use external websites like Browse Feddit just to find stuff to explore is going to be a major stumbling block for the growth of Lemmy. It’s definitely not an accessible way to find communities. I’m personally able to find content I want so far, but the mere attempt to explain the Fediverse works seems to make people roll their eyes or immediately ignore Lemmy out of confusion.
I’m not sure what the solution is. But I just wanted to start a thread on that topic to open up a discussion about that. I think Lemmy has a pretty promising foundation as a social media platform in general otherwise. I’m all ears to any suggestions on how we could make the cross-instance communication that makes the Fediverse so unique easier to understand and explore.
I think what makes it hard to understand as well it that sometimes stuff just doesn’t work currently. Because of the influx of new users, for example.
And new users confuse something not working on the servers side as a mistake they made and get increasingly confused. When it all settled a bit and everything works as expected, I think at least a part of the confusion will be lifted and new users will have an easier time.
I think the most confusing bit is that there are multiple versions of the same “subreddit”, so communities with the same name on different instances. Right now its especially annoying, because we don’t know yet which of them will become the most popular. We need some way to combine those communities into one, preferably on the instance level so users mostly only see one entry per topic.
