this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says "Join a server". I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
I agree that it is unclear to folks that Lemmy is not a platform and this causes frustration and disappointment for new users. It probably should be clearer on join-lemmy.org that this whole thing is just a bunch of servers talking to each other.
It's absolutely a platform, it's just not centralized.
join-lemmy.org needs some serious work if it's really what people are going to link when others ask about it; it's really no wonder that we've mostly only amassed technical folks. I also think the default UI/UX could use a lot of work to bring it up to standards with other modern social sites. I wish that would be a priority for the devs, but I know they only have so much time to devote to things
I tried to solve this a tiny little bit by giving my own instance a clean and friendly frontpage, but I think I still need to do more work to attract people who aren't fedi-inclined.
I like that front page, nice for a 'smaller instance' that has a specific target. I should steal it for no.lastname.nz
Please feel free! Source is on GitHub, it uses Astro with the Starlight template.
I love this landing page. Great job!
Thank you!
Can make this argument for email....
Which is why no one is running their own email server and people go to the platform that is easiest and most well known.
Email has the benefit of legacy. Lemmy does not.