I think we should change our strategy here. Let the currently popular instances be popular, but instead create a site to suggest lemmy instances and then randomize the order they show up in the suggestions.
Don’t try and pull people who already have accounts from the existing instances to build the smaller instances. Try and direct the incoming growth to the smaller instances, instead.
The issue from the beginning was that people wanted to pick where there were already discussions. .world had already started growing a lot more, so new users gravitated to that. As drama happened, there was some splintering, but since you can’t take your history and account with you, there was also resistance to move. What you suggest was discussed during the first big migration to the Fediverse for Lemmy, but it takes time to put things in place and it was already too late to really fix the lopsidedness of who was where.
It’s still a good idea for new users, maybe instead of randomizing have a way to categorize the types of instances and their rules, so people go where they’ll be the happiest. The best way to fix the problem though is to come up with a secure and privacy protecting way to fully move a user from instance to instance. Good luck with that.
The issue on the beginning was that all the instances were way too restrictive on worldview or goal. It makes sense to put communities on them, but it doesn’t make sense to join them as users.
The 2 instances that were aimed at the general public, world and ee grew to be the 1st and 2nd largest ones…
I think we should change our strategy here. Let the currently popular instances be popular, but instead create a site to suggest lemmy instances and then randomize the order they show up in the suggestions.
Don’t try and pull people who already have accounts from the existing instances to build the smaller instances. Try and direct the incoming growth to the smaller instances, instead.
Aim for growth instead of cannibalism.
That’s why I exclusively post on smaller instances from now on.
The issue from the beginning was that people wanted to pick where there were already discussions. .world had already started growing a lot more, so new users gravitated to that. As drama happened, there was some splintering, but since you can’t take your history and account with you, there was also resistance to move. What you suggest was discussed during the first big migration to the Fediverse for Lemmy, but it takes time to put things in place and it was already too late to really fix the lopsidedness of who was where.
It’s still a good idea for new users, maybe instead of randomizing have a way to categorize the types of instances and their rules, so people go where they’ll be the happiest. The best way to fix the problem though is to come up with a secure and privacy protecting way to fully move a user from instance to instance. Good luck with that.
The issue on the beginning was that all the instances were way too restrictive on worldview or goal. It makes sense to put communities on them, but it doesn’t make sense to join them as users.
The 2 instances that were aimed at the general public, world and ee grew to be the 1st and 2nd largest ones…