there are many real-life advantages of choosing instances with established mod- and admin teams and an active community.
This is the thing here, like, for most casual users “decentralisation and spreading the load” is not just far down the list of priorities, it’s literally nonexistent. Content, uptime, reliability, active moderation and low risk of the instance just disappearing one day is what they care about. It’s unfortunate, but I really don’t see a way around it.
Programming.dev had a database corruption issue for 4 months (see !meta@programming.dev ), 1098 MAU. And I’m not saying that people should leave PD, but that issue was concerning for quite a while.
I think on top of what you said, people just don’t want to move and only do so when the instance actually goes down.
Well yes, I was thinking more along the lines of what makes people gravitate to the already big servers when they first create an account. When people are already somewhat established there is another form of friction, or more like inertia. Like you say, people just don’t want to move once they’ve settled down somewhere. Even though it’s very easy to switch instances, and with no karma to care about there is nothing keeping you.
A proven track record, for another, and less likelihood to shut down. Many smaller instances legit did shut down over the years - like I recall one I was wondering if I should join, dmv.social, that chose to shut down during the waves of CSAM attacks, just prior to the automated tool that dbzero created to save the Fediverse.
Smaller instances may also have lesser hardware and less technically-capable admins maintaining it.
It’d be cool if we could move servers. I’m happy with where I am now; but my main reason for picking Lemmy.zip was it showed up near the top of a search. I bet that’s the case for a lot of people
You somewhat can - go to Settings -> Import/Export Settings -> Export as a JSON file and Import after you make a new account elsewhere. DMs and anyone following you won’t be redirected to the new account, but your community subscriptions and block lists will be transferred this way. Repeat as often as necessary:-).
Lemmy.zip seems an okay instance, or at least I cannot recall anything bad about it. Although it doesn’t defederate with any of the big 3 so it’s totally up to your personal efforts to avoid being trolled by users from hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.net, or Lemmy.ml (2 of those 3 are defederated from most large Lemmy instances, so lemmy.zip is a bit unusual in that regard).
I suggest at least checking out PieFed: the experience with the sign-up wizard alone is likely enough to convince you to stay, e.g. you can choose to filter All/Some/None of posts containing keywords “Trump” or “Musk” (if you wanted something like that:-), and it asks what topics you are interested in and then subscribes you to communities based on those answers, rather than leave you to have to discover and sign up to each one individually on your own.
Edit: Or even without an account, and even if you plan to stay with Lemmy, the categories of communities (pre-defined “Topics” and user customizable and shareable “Feeds”), e.g. see in action on PieFed.social, are really cool! 😎 Like multi-Reddits (I hear, I never used those:-) they both aid in community discovery and helping to separate our your interests, like you might not want to actually “subscribe” to any political communities so that those topics don’t show up in your Subscribed feed, and yet still you can read about that topic anytime you want by visiting News and Politics - so you really can both have your cake and eat it too! 😋 🍰🎂
Or for someone located in the USA (low latency ping) looking for a general-purpose Lemmy instance I highly recommend Discuss.Online, especially for a new user coming over from Reddit - it has fantastic uptime and very friendly devs who fix and improve things quickly:-). And it defederates from hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.
Lemmy.zip is the #12 instance in terms of Monthly Active Users, so indeed a good choice in that respect - not too small or too large but in the middle:-). And a great choice for someone who exclusively loves gaming and chooses to pursue that interest by browsing Local rather than All.
Still, it is always good to know what options are available to someone:-).
(just to chime in uninvited to say that we have a bit of code that inserts blocks for hexbear and lemmygrad for new users, so the new user has the option to remove the block and see that sort of content if they want to - we’re all about choice!)
Oh that’s awesome - I recall that a sh.itjust.works admin suggested doing so but then I never heard anymore about that. How does it work - it automatically performs a “user block” it sounds like, but is that using the normal way, and then is a message sent to the user or they can just discover that in their account settings and remove it?
I would argue that it is still insufficient, bc Hexbear users are well-known for trolling behaviors and ignoring the commands of their own admins even when commenting in communities located on other instances besides hexbear.net. However, the user blocking is the only tool that Lemmy provides in that regard offer than full defederation, so that’s still respectable that lemmy.zip is making use of it!
If you are interested, here is my Petition to defederate from hexbear.net from Discuss.Online, bringing together sources of information such as the time when Hexbear admins were caught lying to admins of other instances - a very grave offense - and other similar descriptions of when Hexbear was defederated from most other instances. I admit that they can be fun to talk with if you know what you are getting into, however new users will not be aware of that, and remaining federated with them is most definitely driving people away from your instance - the only question is how many vs. the desires of veterans who don’t need such hand-holding to retain it.
It would be so much easier if Lemmy software offered a true instance block, but instead it is horribly misnamed, and would have been far better called a community muting. Thus right now, full defederation is literally the only way to stop new users from getting bullied by them, without extensive moderation efforts by each community they choose to participate in (which admittedly isn’t all that frequent in the total sense, and yet even one bad experience can send a user user fleeing back to Reddit? At least that’s what I’ve read in r/RedditAlternatives - not mentioning Lemmy.zip by name but just “Lemmy” in general as being a place with tons of trolls, of which I would say that Hexbears are the most well-known and highest extreme cases among us).
But that’s just my two cents, in case it helps to put forth that perspective, as we all want to see Lemmy grow and reach out to welcome more (former) Reddit users:-).
We have a hook into the account creation process via the api, and when a new accout is created we basically mimic the user inserting personal instance blocks directly in the db. We also pm new users on account creation so we include info on how to remove the blocks there. It’s about the best in-the-middle solution i can do at the moment!
I agree fully with you around the moderation tools built in - it really needs some development. We do a lot via our bot to try and provide some better tooling and especially focus on the onboarding part of a new user. I think 1.0 includes some improvements here.
I can’t say how effective all of this work has been for user retention, but I’m hoping it helps get a few people away from reddit!
This is the thing here, like, for most casual users “decentralisation and spreading the load” is not just far down the list of priorities, it’s literally nonexistent. Content, uptime, reliability, active moderation and low risk of the instance just disappearing one day is what they care about. It’s unfortunate, but I really don’t see a way around it.
Lemmy.zip does an amazing job with reliability and transparency, see their latest report https://lemmy.zip/post/35411310?scrollToComments=true
They still aren’t that popular, 12th with 740 MAU https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Programming.dev had a database corruption issue for 4 months (see !meta@programming.dev ), 1098 MAU. And I’m not saying that people should leave PD, but that issue was concerning for quite a while.
I think on top of what you said, people just don’t want to move and only do so when the instance actually goes down.
Well yes, I was thinking more along the lines of what makes people gravitate to the already big servers when they first create an account. When people are already somewhat established there is another form of friction, or more like inertia. Like you say, people just don’t want to move once they’ve settled down somewhere. Even though it’s very easy to switch instances, and with no karma to care about there is nothing keeping you.
Name recognition, for one.
A proven track record, for another, and less likelihood to shut down. Many smaller instances legit did shut down over the years - like I recall one I was wondering if I should join, dmv.social, that chose to shut down during the waves of CSAM attacks, just prior to the automated tool that dbzero created to save the Fediverse.
Smaller instances may also have lesser hardware and less technically-capable admins maintaining it.
It’d be cool if we could move servers. I’m happy with where I am now; but my main reason for picking Lemmy.zip was it showed up near the top of a search. I bet that’s the case for a lot of people
You somewhat can - go to Settings -> Import/Export Settings -> Export as a JSON file and Import after you make a new account elsewhere. DMs and anyone following you won’t be redirected to the new account, but your community subscriptions and block lists will be transferred this way. Repeat as often as necessary:-).
Lemmy.zip seems an okay instance, or at least I cannot recall anything bad about it. Although it doesn’t defederate with any of the big 3 so it’s totally up to your personal efforts to avoid being trolled by users from hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.net, or Lemmy.ml (2 of those 3 are defederated from most large Lemmy instances, so lemmy.zip is a bit unusual in that regard).
I suggest at least checking out PieFed: the experience with the sign-up wizard alone is likely enough to convince you to stay, e.g. you can choose to filter All/Some/None of posts containing keywords “Trump” or “Musk” (if you wanted something like that:-), and it asks what topics you are interested in and then subscribes you to communities based on those answers, rather than leave you to have to discover and sign up to each one individually on your own.
Edit: Or even without an account, and even if you plan to stay with Lemmy, the categories of communities (pre-defined “Topics” and user customizable and shareable “Feeds”), e.g. see in action on PieFed.social, are really cool! 😎 Like multi-Reddits (I hear, I never used those:-) they both aid in community discovery and helping to separate our your interests, like you might not want to actually “subscribe” to any political communities so that those topics don’t show up in your Subscribed feed, and yet still you can read about that topic anytime you want by visiting News and Politics - so you really can both have your cake and eat it too! 😋 🍰🎂
Or for someone located in the USA (low latency ping) looking for a general-purpose Lemmy instance I highly recommend Discuss.Online, especially for a new user coming over from Reddit - it has fantastic uptime and very friendly devs who fix and improve things quickly:-). And it defederates from hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.
Lemmy.zip is the #12 instance in terms of Monthly Active Users, so indeed a good choice in that respect - not too small or too large but in the middle:-). And a great choice for someone who exclusively loves gaming and chooses to pursue that interest by browsing Local rather than All.
Still, it is always good to know what options are available to someone:-).
(just to chime in uninvited to say that we have a bit of code that inserts blocks for hexbear and lemmygrad for new users, so the new user has the option to remove the block and see that sort of content if they want to - we’re all about choice!)
Oh that’s awesome - I recall that a sh.itjust.works admin suggested doing so but then I never heard anymore about that. How does it work - it automatically performs a “user block” it sounds like, but is that using the normal way, and then is a message sent to the user or they can just discover that in their account settings and remove it?
I would argue that it is still insufficient, bc Hexbear users are well-known for trolling behaviors and ignoring the commands of their own admins even when commenting in communities located on other instances besides hexbear.net. However, the user blocking is the only tool that Lemmy provides in that regard offer than full defederation, so that’s still respectable that lemmy.zip is making use of it!
If you are interested, here is my Petition to defederate from hexbear.net from Discuss.Online, bringing together sources of information such as the time when Hexbear admins were caught lying to admins of other instances - a very grave offense - and other similar descriptions of when Hexbear was defederated from most other instances. I admit that they can be fun to talk with if you know what you are getting into, however new users will not be aware of that, and remaining federated with them is most definitely driving people away from your instance - the only question is how many vs. the desires of veterans who don’t need such hand-holding to retain it.
It would be so much easier if Lemmy software offered a true instance block, but instead it is horribly misnamed, and would have been far better called a community muting. Thus right now, full defederation is literally the only way to stop new users from getting bullied by them, without extensive moderation efforts by each community they choose to participate in (which admittedly isn’t all that frequent in the total sense, and yet even one bad experience can send a user user fleeing back to Reddit? At least that’s what I’ve read in r/RedditAlternatives - not mentioning Lemmy.zip by name but just “Lemmy” in general as being a place with tons of trolls, of which I would say that Hexbears are the most well-known and highest extreme cases among us).
But that’s just my two cents, in case it helps to put forth that perspective, as we all want to see Lemmy grow and reach out to welcome more (former) Reddit users:-).
We have a hook into the account creation process via the api, and when a new accout is created we basically mimic the user inserting personal instance blocks directly in the db. We also pm new users on account creation so we include info on how to remove the blocks there. It’s about the best in-the-middle solution i can do at the moment!
I agree fully with you around the moderation tools built in - it really needs some development. We do a lot via our bot to try and provide some better tooling and especially focus on the onboarding part of a new user. I think 1.0 includes some improvements here.
I can’t say how effective all of this work has been for user retention, but I’m hoping it helps get a few people away from reddit!