it’s weird that, because once you’re in it’s basically seamless. it’s just that first step of picking a server based on your interests that trips people up, because aren’t you supposed to pick interests after you get in? more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D
yeah but, again, it’s seamless. my instance only hosts content in swedish, but that’s not really a problem. sorting by scaled means i still see things that happen locally mixed in with everything else.
More instances with minimal/no defederation would help. That way you can just tell people to pick one of those instances and it doesn’t matter which one.
i mean maybe. i initially chose one of those instances for mastodon, but it turns out when you don’t defederate from anyone, others defederate from you because you act as a proxy for the nazis and pedos to reach other instances. so i couldn’t talk to my friends. it’s a bit of a hassle.
PieFed.zip is very new-user friendly (see very minimal instance blo ck list). I don’t see the requirement for an endless barrage of new instances being a blocker - the amount that we have now is sufficient to handle far more capacity than the entire Threadiverse is currently capable of demanding from the servers.
Quite the opposite: most stories I see about people talking about the Threadiverse is how toxic AF we are, and elitist leftists, not welcoming to liberal centrists e.g. in the USA. So if the goal were to bring on more people from Reddit (setting aside for the morning whether that is truly a worthwhile aim), then more censorship of toxicity is what would more readily make that happen, not less moderation. e.g. one glance at hexbear and your average Redditor will never come back here again:-P.
I disagree, you def would need to block the worst places. A good new-user friendly instance would block far-right and authoritarian content.
PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach: it blocks the most controversial instances but not as defederations i.e. at the instance level, and instead does so automatically for every new account upon sign-up, then sends the user a message explaining how to remove that block. From there they can unblock, reblock, back and forth as they choose at will. It thus makes federation with hexbear and Lemmygrad as opt-in rather than opt-out or obligatory or neglected as all other instances across the Threadiverse do.
I do not recall if it does this for lemmy.ml as well - I would suspect not, sadly, but then again it would be fairly unique in that respect if it did, as virtually no major instances do so.
And as far as far-right instances, those do not really exist, though nonetheless the historical ones are in the defederation list (exploding heads, freespeechextremists, and ofc threads.net:-P), and surely over time new instances could be added as well.
Finally I will add that I’ve never seen the tiniest hint of documentation for any of this - not in https://piefed.zip/defed_policy, or the welcome messages in their announcements or home local communities, and now I don’t see their listing anywhere in the instance picker site, despite trying multiple host instances of that including themselves. I only know about this since I took questioned how Newbie-friendly any instance was that federates with the above-mentioned pair, and the instance admin told me about this, but even now months later I still don’t see an official description written down about this somewhere easily accessible by people.
The Threadiverse is still very much a Work-In-Progress! But… it’s getting better, and PieFed.zip is a major part of that progress, it looks to me.
Foni@piefed.zip 8 hours ago
I have never understood the importance of choosing an instance, especially at the beginning. Sign up for any one, try it for a while and if you need to change later, you can do so without problems.
On sites like mastodon where followers are essential it can be a problem, in lemmy where karma is not even accumulated, changing servers does not make you lose more than the 5 minutes it takes you to do it
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
It’s a bit of a faff to export and import your followed community list
Foni@piefed.zip 3 hours ago
I have changed instances several times and it seems to me to be the simplest mechanism humanly imaginable.
Vittelius@feddit.org 4 hours ago
For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you’re not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.
The paradox situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.