I just saw this post over on r/modcoord which is basically a massive list of subreddits participating in the blackout protest. If I’m being honest I haven’t seen this much anger and coordinated frustration since the era right before the digg exodus.
Assuming more and more subreddits join in, it’s going to send a pretty massive message to the users who interact with a blacked out subreddit. Then I’m trying to imagine what happens if after a massive coordinated blackout, Reddit continue on the current trajectory. Is Lemmy even prepared to handle the amount of potential incoming traffic that API closure could lead to? It’s absolutely bonkers to me that the Reddit team might just stay the course…
#1 Same with a lot of new social media, discord actually meant something different before 2015
#2 They don’t need to at a technical level
#3 If you find it challenging to decide which server to join then I really don’t know what to tell you. Its a small barrier to entry and objectively a good thing. An small IQ test of sorts.
#4 I’d imagine this is for spam / bot protection, and it may change in the future. I kinda like it, it keeps a lot of toxic users / trolls out. Sure the community is smaller but its more inviting for those that took the time.
#5 How is that different from reddit? View r/all at anytime and it was composed of left wing articles and users.
#6 Not 100% sure what your arguing here
#7 I actually find the idea of similar communities on different instances confusing (eg. !memes@lemmy.ml & !memes@beehaw)
edit: spelling
edit 2: it may be a little confusing to users that all servers can talk to eachother through federation so thats probably what confuses people. This could be explained better on the join-lemmy webpage. either way this will probably be similar to mastadon in terms of how it’ll go down, lots of users join, instances have a hard time keeping up at first, then they stabilize.
Personally I think the requirement to explain why you want to join a lemmy instance is 100% brilliant. If you can answer coherently you’re clearly not a robot, and probably don’t intend to spam.
The text field itself doesn’t require any minimum or maximum character counts so there’s no pressure to be wordy. In fact I think those who read that information appreciates when you can achieve some brevity but still communicate clearly in your own words why you’re signing up.
Additionally different instances have different priorities and needs; so I suspect they can ask for even more information or writing samples if needed; or ask for as little as possible to discourage users from being too crazy.
100% agree, I kinda hope they keep it in a way because its probably better than most standard captchas.
You’re right, and the manual signups should help slow the flood of users.
Like I said, #3 and #5 aren’t a problem if you know about federation. But without understanding the concept of federation you might have some misunderstandings about Lemmy. For example, you might think that when you sign up for an instance you can only see communities on that instance. So the choice of instance becomes very important. Alternatively, you might think that all instances are automatically connected. So you might not know that instance admins can block other instances (like how beehaw blocks lemmygrad). Then, because you want nothing to do with lemmygrad, you might decide not to be a part of Lemmy.
By point #6, I just meant to say that Lemmy is a much smaller community than redditors are used to.
Also, as an addendum, not all of these are problems for me. Clearly, I’m using Lemmy so I made it past these hurdles lol. But, yeah, some people are going to see that you have to write an essay and just nope outta here. Some of those people aren’t toxic, they’re just lazy. And, in many ways, Lemmy forces you to go that extra mile which is going to hurt its user growth.
Yes and thats true aswell, some instances aren’t connected to one another so that might be an issue for someone just picking a random instance. The solution is quite simple though, make it clear in the join-lemmy page the federation status, or have a link to all the banned instances the admins have put in place. Overall I’m still very hopeful and worried about the coming days, this community has already grown but its not over yet.