this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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Fediverse
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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I was never much of an /r/all user, it's always been niche communities for me. I feel like almost all of my niches have content here now (if not quite as much engagement as I'd like). !retrogaming@lemmy.world in particular has exploded with activity lately and arguably can now serve as a full replacement for its subreddit counterpart.
Thing is, when I try to bring people on Lemmy, it's always "why?" and if I make it that far, "how?" With the how, I've been using the analogy of signing up for email, though it's still not as smooth as it could be. Eyes glaze over when anyone starts asking me about how the Fediverse in general works.
The why is harder. I don't know how much user bleed-over niche Reddit got from /r/all users but I'm guessing it wasn't a trivial amount. I'm sure a lot of Reddit's growth was owed to AMAs, so it's possible Lemmy might need something flashy to draw in users who will then filter into communities waiting for them. Some sort of content unique to the platform. I do think before we get there we need a friendlier way to help new people find communities they may have interest in.
You don't have to bother with that. Just send them to a single instance to sign up. Stable, general-purpose instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, or lemmy.zip are good recommendations. You don't really need to understand the details of how federation works to start using Lemmy. They can learn as they go.