I think people should pay (way) more attention to the domain name when creating a Lemmy instance. This is, of course, for admins of instances.
Instances such as lemmy.dbzer0.com and lemm.ee and such are just so unfriendly, in the name, that I think they do a disservice to Lemmy. They end up splitting the community. Due to the weird domain names, there will be privacy.lemmy.dbzer0.com, but the domain is just so unfriendly that people will also create privacy.lemmy.world and privacy.lemmy.ml and etc and it just creates unnecessary friction.
If you are considering creating a lemmy instance, please, please, think of the domain name. You cannot change it later!
I think there are advances and disadvantages to this. Decentralization is definitely an advantage, however, having the same community split between many instances splits the community and the conversations and makes finding and interacting with the community much harder. This wouldn’t be much of a problem on a very big userbase (such as reddit), but on a smaller userbase (such as lemmy), it does constitute a problem in my view.
Having said that, there are probably some UI/UX tricks that could be done to improve this sort of thing. For example, when subscribing to a “privacy” community, there could be a suggestions box/pop-up/whatever showing other privacy communities. Perhaps a graph of communities.
People usually just subscribe to both.
Also the same community can be very different on different servers because the rules might be different, the moderation, etc.
From a subscriber’s perspective, it’s fine.
From a poster’s perspective, not knowing where to post cause decision fatigue.
Crossposting to all the communities is cumbersome and splinters discussion
Recent example: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39998214?scrollToComments=true
Some people, yes. But the person that wants something that “just works” probably doesn’t feel like searching for all the privacy communities. He/She does not want to have to search which one is the most active, which one has the best rules, etc etc. That point makes it a negative. My point is that reducing friction of usage is a good thing, for growing communities at least, such as lemmy.
And just to be clear, I am the most pro-decentralization person you will ever find. I am not against lemmy. I hate reddit and what it stands for.
I agree with you on that point. Feel free to join [email protected] and [email protected] , those communities might interest you
I think if you really examine the realities of what you are saying, you’ll land on split communities being fine. It gives people a place to go if there are rogue admins or mods.
No, it’s not user friendly but I also don’t think attracting every single person to Lemmy is a good goal. There are plenty of people on Reddit in happy to have stay there.
My claim is not that Lemmy should attract every single person. However, it does need to attract many many people. Here is why:
I think we all want to open a post about astronomy and read “Astronomer here. Here is what this post is saying:”. Or read a post about nutrition and have someone with actual nutrition knowledge talk about the topic at hand. Perhaps even the author of the paper?
Do you want a random guy who installed arch-linux commentating (probably a shitty meme) on a highly specialized topic about math? Or do you want Terence Tao leaving his thoughts? I want the later. In order to have that, Lemmy needs to be welcoming to everyone and not just to people who know how to install Arch.
I use arch btw.
I mean I hear you. And the experience can be made better, but where that clashes with decentralization, I’d rather decentralization wins.
You can’t fix this because this is how the fediverse is designed to be. Multicommunities might be a thing in the future which might solve this “issue” of yours visually: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818