Sorry for being unclear. What I meant is:

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore [as a presence in the fediverse].

When they run the most and the biggest popular communities on their instances, do most of the development, offer the best tools and services in the fediverse, they have become too big to ignore.

If they then start playing dirty, it is too late to defederate them. They will play dirty. Let’s not make ourselves dependent.

why would I want to keep in contact with the “head in the sand” people

Forget contacts. Imagine Meta has

• poured way more developing hours in their fork than the FOSS community ever could
• the most effective and easy to use mod tools
• the best search tools for finding communities, topics and everything else (by a margin)
• free instance hosting
• every major wish list feature implemented
• a working feed with endless content you actually find interesting
• a vibrant community for every niche interest you might have
• advanced development so much that it feels a couple versions ahead

The more money they throw at this, the more people will feel tempted to join or at least try their service. It offers objective benefits. It would feel like using lemmy 0.09 when others already enjoy 0.18.

Many people still miss their niche topics. Some size is required for certain things to become viable.

There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.

The first step is a UX disaster: https://join-lemmy.org/

Only 2 clicks / pages down the road you can start registering an account, and you don’t see what the experience might be before that. Instead, you’re being presented tech talk about servers.

You might argue it’s not actually lemmy but just the landing page. I argue, it’s so good at being a scarecrow, most people visiting lemmy haven’t seen anything else except for that page.

The inner lemmy is pretty fine, I agree. Some parts are still confusing. For example, most people will not figure out they can search for content from within a specific community by carefully configuring the drop downs in the general search form. Most will look for the search directly attached to the community.

If Meta plays dirty, defederate them then. Now is just too premature.

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore. If you let them gain that much ground, it’s too late to isolate them without doing even more harm to your own network.

Also Meta is not a startup with unknown reputation. Meta plays dirty, that’s a given.

Once a project is forked away, you no longer have any control at all.

What does that mean in the context of lemmy’s license? As I understand it, everyone is allowed to fork it away, but not allowed to change the license. Which allows everyone to fork it further away or back.

I don’t understand what control means in this context. Isn’t it a thing people can just modify and use, now and for all future?

It would be possible to do this study without contamination by using completely unknown and newly-released songs

When writing songs, I always wondered if that genius idea is actually just something I heard 10 years ago, but don’t remember consciously. Similarly, I wonder if I like a catchy tune because it is catchy in itself, or because it reminds me of something which I cannot recall consciously right now.

Sometimes, I had these moments later when the dots connect, sometimes not. With what confidence could I conclude something is new and original?

I guess that’s just another task for future AI.

• Some of the biggest communities like r/pics, r/aww, and r/GIF decided to post John Oliver pictures and GIFs. In a tweet, Oliver approved this move.
• In the case of r/aww, the community is also allowed to post pictures of Chiijohn.
• r/iPhone decided to post pictures celebrating “dashing” Tim Cook.
• r/Shitposting banned posts with the letter k.
• r/Wellthatsucks is now a subreddit about vacuum cleaners.
• r/Nofans is now a passive PC cooler subreddit.
• r/Interestingasfuck removed a lot of all rules apart from asking members to not break site-wide rules.
• r/Memes is allowing only Medieval / Landed Gentry memes. This is in response to Huffman’s “Landed Gentry” comment about protesting subreddits.
• r/PokemonGo is now allowing pictures of John Oliver, Pikachu, or Spark.
• r/Horny is now a “Christian Minecraft server.”
• r/Steam members are posting about actual steam.
• r/HarryPotter is now referring to Huffman as Voldemort.
• Some subreddits such as r/Showerthoughts are determining close days for the community.

Glorious.

You’ll love what r/steam did.

I do! LOL! Thanks for letting us know.

You’re right, situations can occur. But it’s not a permanent thing. People can make another new account on an instance which they deem suitable after they have familiarized themselves with lemmy by spending some days or weeks in it. Expecting a bloody newcomer to choose a good instance isn’t so far from random choice anyways.

Also tbh, I have little to no interactions with people from my instance. I subscribe to topics I care for regardless of where they are hosted. People like me would hardly notice they share a server with nazis, as each would flock to different communities.

Everyone who posts or comments gets automatically banned by automod, as participation is working and against community ideals.

So good :D

I think it’s foolish to point to the trends from the last week and try to draw conclusions about the future, as this is clearly an extraordinary circumstance.

Yes, for sure. Maybe we simply have different standards about truthful statements. I did not mean to imply lemmy could grow like that forever. I just pointed out that it does in a moment when you said it could not, that’s all.

We’re mostly on the same page. reddit will continue to exist (although time will tell in which state).

I got hung up on the statement “It won’t get more users if it continues to be difficult to use”, because it is evidently false, unnuanced. I still want lemmy to implement these features, as it would help growth (and mostly, the individual users) even further.

if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn’t allowing new registrations.

I think anyways the registration process should be dumbed down. Simple version:

• User sees no instances or servers during registration
• When they click on ‘register’, a random instance (which allows new registrations) is chosen
• There is a small link ‘advanced options’ which allows users to see and choose instances

This would balance the load between instances and make it much easier for newcomers to join.

I realize we were talking about slightly different views. You had a scenario in mind where people try to join a specific instance (for example because someone promoted that specific instance somewhere else), I was talking about https://join-lemmy.org/

Compare it to e-mail. If you want to switch provider you have to backup and restore your emails if you want to.

When moving to another mail provider, I can forward mails going to the old address to the new one.

When moving to another lemmy account (technically creating an unconnected second one), I have no way to be notified of replies to posts or comments I made with the old account.

There are a couple other use cases where the comparison doesn’t really hold. My hopes are on Moving user profile to a new instance #1985, but it probably won’t be implemented any time soon.

if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-

Things would go much smoother!

Somehow I trust the individual instances to self regulate. When an instance thinks it should not grow any further at the moment, it can close for new registrations, and users will naturally flock to others which are still open. I don’t see this as a responsibility of the users, and in case of users completely new to lemmy, I also don’t see how they could make a reliably informed decision.

And there is another issue related to the first one. Not exactly the same, but being able to truly move to another home instance would do it for me.

I mean …

That’s active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.

So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.

One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don’t think it’s right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren’t.

I like what /r/pics did.

We – the so-called “landed gentry” – appreciate that Reddit is made great by its users. Uncompensated contributors populate the platform’s many communities with their content, just as volunteer moderators keep spam and bigotry at bay. Since neither we nor Reddit would be here without you, it was only fair to let you determine what /r/Pics should include… and you overwhelmingly chose to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. (Seriously, the final vote was -2,329 to 37,331.)

As such, /r/Pics will henceforth feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy.

It’s great, have a scroll. No intent to derail, here’s the thread on !reddit@lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.world/post/206467

I wonder if a similar stunt would have been possible for /r/antiwork. Any ideas? How about: “You must rest on weekdays. Posts and comments are only allowed on weekends.”

Interesting that it’s possible with RES. But it requires the user to copy paste some code.

A better automated approach:

PowerDeleteSuite. Smooth process, can recommend. AMA if you have troubles or questions.

Also allows you to replace posts/comments with another text, for example hints where to go instead.