Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!
I gave it a couple of weeks, never got an email about whether my account was approved or denied. It was as transparent as mud. I mentioned it on IRC, and someone said “Oh just keep trying different servers.” Initially when I looked at the list a lot of them expressed that they were for people of leftist political leaning, for various countries specifically, LGBTQ+, POC. Joining a server was a complicated process of “What do I join? Will I be welcome there? What is their process? Why am I not seeing any answer?”
Then there’s finding communities. You can list them, and for all instances, but then it’s quite a massive list to sort through. Searching is hit or miss, and depends on knowing that you have to specifically try to search all instances. Community names aren’t super easy to discern so you have to try various forms of your search terms. And trying to do the “reddit like” syntax of /c/<area of interest> only works on your present server, so unless you know the exact name of the instance you want to try that community on to use the @<lemmy.instance> syntax, it won’t work.