According to Google translate, “sopuli” in Finnish means “lemming”

What in the actual fuck?

“You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which you choose” 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn’t matter why make the choice?

This is a great point. If it doesn’t matter, why not randomly assign you to an instance? The reality is that it does because some instances are political, and some federate with other instances that could give a negative impression of Lemmy. By people recommending particular instances to sign up to, shows that there’s an element of calculation as to which instance to pick.

Onto your second point, your impact would be negligible. I wouldn’t worry about that scenario.

People always use the email comparison but it’s really not the same, it’s more complicated than that. We know it’s not too much of a big deal but it is when you don’t know what it means to be on a server.

I remember being presented with a choice of servers myself and wondering what on earth it meant, and just wanting to join the “default” one. Ultimately it doesn’t matter too much but at the time it feels like a big hurdle.

So that basically just leaves lemmy.world :|

I guess the question is: what’s more important: trying to avoid putting most users on a single instance, or just accept that people are going to see some hexgrad nonsense in their feeds?

It would be nice to have thriving communities for niche things. That can only really happen when there’s decent numbers though. I do understand the hesitation though.

A much larger userbase will bring its own problems for instance admins, where I’m sure it’ll start turning into full-time jobs to keep the lights on.

It would solve the problem of choosing an instance, as the join Lemmy process would sign you up to that automatically rather than making them choose an instance.

According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, the top 5 (where top 5 is defined by user count) are:

• lemmy.world
• lemm.ee
• sh.itjust.works
• hexbear
• lemmy.dbzer0

After there’s:

• beehaw
• lemmygrad
• programming.dev
• lemmy.ca

Lemmy.world is pretty safe and generic, but it’s already huge (173k users vs 33k of lemm.ee).

Lemm.ee is also a safe bet.

Hexbear is totally out of question

dbzer0 is great, but it leans heavily in a political direction

Sadly you’re probably right. It would be nice if there were some load balancing mechanism where restrigrations could be shut for the larger instances where it recognises that it’s grown much larger than the rest, and recommend altnerative instances.

By read-only, I mean they couldn’t create any communities. So essentially it would be an instance that has accounts but nothing else. Users would still be able to vote and comment on other commnities and subscribe. They could stay on it if they wanted to, but of course they wouldn’t be able to create any communities.

Yeah you can browse an instance without being logged in, so that would be possible.

Just recommend a website for them to join.

But the crux is which one do you recommend? We don’t want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it’ll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World).

Ideally we shouldn’t need to go through this motion of trying to work out which instance to choose or recommend one for them, they should be able to do that themselves after getting their feet wet.

The biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.

When you go to “join lemmy”, rather than choosing a username, you’re presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn’t really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it’s not a process they’re used to. Users are likely asking themselves:

• Am I going to miss out on content from other instances?
• Do I need an account per instance to interact with their communities?

Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn’t create any communities. So basically when they they’re directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.

On the discovery front, a potential idea would be to allow communities to have a specific category tags field. When a user signs up, the host instance could have a page that they’re directed to (this would be controlled by the instance, so they wouldn’t have to have it enabled) which lets the users pick some topics they’re interested in and can then subscribe to the communities right away.

This is me. Frankly, I’m surprised people are choosing to use the new UI, but I guess maybe they only discovered reddit when it had the new UI.

When I first read it I thought they were mentioning that as a selling point! But yeah it seems like they’re saying it like it’s a bad thing.

Instance checks out.

Eli5: What are the consequences for the Russian government if this trend continues and they can’t stop it?

Our instance is federated with hexbear, lemmygrad etc. I want to be resonsible for what I see and block, I’m really not a fan of defederation unless it’s a last resort (i.e. CSAM or other illegal content).

I did end up blocking the lemmy.ml instance though, fuck that place. I haven’t even blocked hexbear or lemmygrad.