New user here…what? Easy to use? I’ve gotten to the point where I know how to do things, but, it’s still needlessly complicated. Yes there are many active communities, but there are also not very many of them. The ironic thing is, you need to be discussing mainstream topics on the non-mainstream platform. If I wanted to talk about my favorite band? Nobody is here to do that. And if I do find a niche community here, but it’s on another instance? NOW I know what to do. But when I first got here, I was ONLY subscribing to sublemmys on .world because it’s the only way I knew how.
For this platform to grow, we’re going to have to make it easy. Like, braindead easy.
Make it so you just click “join”. Make it so you’re logged in across ALL of Lemmy. Your posts may originate from Lemmy.World, but a non-techie wouldn’t know or care about any of that. I see Lemmy making a big deal about the seperate instances. Like it’s a selling point. It’s only a selling point for people smart enough to understand it.
But imagine Britney. Now Britney is a fictional person I just made up to represent your bottom of the barrel intelligence level of people these days. Britney is just some pretty valley girl. She doesn’t know what RSS is. She’s never heard of Linux, despite having an android phone. Britney is who you cater the site to. Because Britney is America. She wants sublemmys about “The Voice” and “The Masked Singer”. She wants a sublemmy for Taylor Swift. I think you’re starting to get the type of person I’m talking about.
You can still operate Lemmy almost exactly how it is now. Just make it so even if you know NONE of that stuff, you can still operate it freely. I will use MySpace as an example (for the brief 4 years it was the top social media). There was a default MySpace look. If all you did was sign up, and do nothing else, you still had a myspace account, and you could still customize it to an extent. It’s the basic profile everyone thinks of when you think of a myspace profile. The colors, the layout, the look. It was still usable. Then you had people using CSS and HTML and I think Javascript was available. Now suddenly you have 50 different profiles, all looking completely different. All functioning exactly the same, but you could go as deep or as shallow as you wanted.
THATS what this site needs. Don’t take away the stuff for the techie people. Let them go nuts. Let them do crazy things with this platform. But also, to increase userbase, make it as shallow as possible unless the user changes things. America wants shallow and not challenging. America doesn’t want to think. Britney just wants a place to type “I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR!” over and over. You can keep her happy, and keep yourselves happy. And I’m somewhere in the middle. It needs to be a platform that conforms to the user. Because if the user needs to conform to the platform, they will not join that platform.
New user here…what? Easy to use? I’ve gotten to the point where I know how to do things, but, it’s still needlessly complicated. Yes there are many active communities, but there are also not very many of them. The ironic thing is, you need to be discussing mainstream topics on the non-mainstream platform. If I wanted to talk about my favorite band? Nobody is here to do that. And if I do find a niche community here, but it’s on another instance? NOW I know what to do. But when I first got here, I was ONLY subscribing to sublemmys on .world because it’s the only way I knew how.
For this platform to grow, we’re going to have to make it easy. Like, braindead easy.
Make it so you just click “join”. Make it so you’re logged in across ALL of Lemmy. Your posts may originate from Lemmy.World, but a non-techie wouldn’t know or care about any of that. I see Lemmy making a big deal about the seperate instances. Like it’s a selling point. It’s only a selling point for people smart enough to understand it.
But imagine Britney. Now Britney is a fictional person I just made up to represent your bottom of the barrel intelligence level of people these days. Britney is just some pretty valley girl. She doesn’t know what RSS is. She’s never heard of Linux, despite having an android phone. Britney is who you cater the site to. Because Britney is America. She wants sublemmys about “The Voice” and “The Masked Singer”. She wants a sublemmy for Taylor Swift. I think you’re starting to get the type of person I’m talking about.
You can still operate Lemmy almost exactly how it is now. Just make it so even if you know NONE of that stuff, you can still operate it freely. I will use MySpace as an example (for the brief 4 years it was the top social media). There was a default MySpace look. If all you did was sign up, and do nothing else, you still had a myspace account, and you could still customize it to an extent. It’s the basic profile everyone thinks of when you think of a myspace profile. The colors, the layout, the look. It was still usable. Then you had people using CSS and HTML and I think Javascript was available. Now suddenly you have 50 different profiles, all looking completely different. All functioning exactly the same, but you could go as deep or as shallow as you wanted.
THATS what this site needs. Don’t take away the stuff for the techie people. Let them go nuts. Let them do crazy things with this platform. But also, to increase userbase, make it as shallow as possible unless the user changes things. America wants shallow and not challenging. America doesn’t want to think. Britney just wants a place to type “I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR!” over and over. You can keep her happy, and keep yourselves happy. And I’m somewhere in the middle. It needs to be a platform that conforms to the user. Because if the user needs to conform to the platform, they will not join that platform.