I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”
This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.
I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.
So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?
I think personally that we should just give it time. We don’t need to attract everyone and we’ve already got a lot of work to do.
I personally believe that what we have today is enough to serve as a battery for organic, natural growth through word of mouth. We just need to keep going and convince people through genuine effort that we can do better as a platform.
This is exactly what I think.
I don’t think we need people who will not investigate on their own. We’re not trying to catch wild animals, but people we will interact with.
I would rather have fewer people who are fully convinced in the project, than have to be constantly reassuring them that the tankies under the bed aren’t going to get them.
Are you really ready to make that promise? I have a pretty tall bed and I haven’t asked everyone under there what their ideologies are.
There is no need to promise anything. My point is that people have to take control and responsibility of their own experiences.
If they don’t want to encounter X people, they can go to an instance that defeds X server. Or find another alternative, since Lemmy is not the only one.
Most sane answer. Let the haters hate. You probably won’t convince them otherwise
Not only do we not need to attract everyone, we cannot attract everyone. At least not short to mid term. If everybody on reddit suddenly jumped on the lemmy bandwagon, the whole network would go down faster than you could blink.