The biggest F U you get while signing up on lemmy is choosing a instance and I know this process acts as a filter in itself, clearing the randoms and normies. But if lemmy instance is assigned randomly, it is like hitting two birds with one stone. it solves discouragement you get when signing up but also distributes the load on different servers. the only downside I see with this is if the instance is closed.
Edit: I know there are a lot of variables and dependencies that I didn’t think of earlier. But I just wanted to imagine a welcome page of lemmy with simple, and as less steps as possible in the sign up process.
Good luck to them if they are randomly assigned to hexbear or lemmygrad
Yeah, the biggest problem with this approach is different moderation philosophies. You would have to set up a vetted set of approved non-problematic instances. I’ve read several accounts of people who tried out fedi and left soon after, and nothing sours the newcomer experience more than unknowingly joining an instance with a toxic community/moderators
I hear that, but wouldnt that also prevent echo chambers
Not if the admins of an instance want to maintain their echo chamber by shepherding discussions towards extremist viewpoints.
There is another downside. The local and global feeds are potent discovery tools. But they only work if you group people with similar interests onto the same instance. Your proposal assumes a certain amount of homogeneity. If everyone is interested in the same content anyway then yes you can distribute it randomly. But all the people interested in Linux memes are already here. If we are to expand our reach we need to have instances catering to other interests.
And it also doesn’t work with international communities. German speakers for example go to feddit.org, precisely because that’s where German content is going to be amplified via the local feed and therefore easier to discover (for people an that particular instance)
Most users that are not from the english-speaking world can just join one of the few servers in their language:
- german: 2 servers
- spanish: 2 servers
- portoguese: 2 servers
- italian: 1 server
- polish: 1 server
Source: join-lemmy.org
The list of communities by country is in the sidebar of !yurop@lemm.ee
I know this process acts as a filter in itself, clearing the randoms and normies.
This could be retained by having instances opt into/out of random allocation of new users.
Instead of having it be completely random, I am thinking of a site similar to sub.rehab.
Instances that are open to public signup would register on the site, and give updated states on how many users they have along with a brief description of what they are for.
Users can decide roughly what size instance they’d like to join and view a list of matches. We could add a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that picks a random one out from the list.
