Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.

That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.

Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!

  • c2h6@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Yeah I just tell people to join lemmy.world or beehaw and look for “all” instead of local. If they’re interested, they’ll find out about instances later.

    • isdfoa@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      My dumbass thought ‘local’ meant popular in my geo location and ‘all’ is worldwide when I first joined 😅

      • jugalator@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Yeah I think during design, they sometimes forget and use terminology that makes sense out of a federation perspective rather than newcomers. “Local” could as well have been named “This Server” and it would be much more clear.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Funny that you mention two very popular instances, one of which is now defederated from the other, so content between them isn’t shared. I agree with OP that a lot of people are just going to throw up their hands if they hit something like that early on.

      I’m generally getting the hang of it, and get why we have situations like this defederation thing happening, but I’ve also been a software engineer for close to 40 years. I made a personal decision not to recommend it to some of my family members because I don’t think it’s ready for them. I think an app that automated things like subscribing to communities on other instances would go a long way.