This one is my biggest challenge too… I wish there was, like, a “trial” instance that folks were automatically signed up for and then after 30 days they had to switch and find another instance.
Once you’re in the door it’s lovely, but that first barrier to entry scares people off.
I said this a while ago on another thread, but if I was a Dev on the project I would be working to create a website that automatically signs you up for an instance. The high level concept is instances would opt into this pool, the user would simply put in their username like any regular website, and then the system would create them an account on whichever instance was best for them (maybe based on ping/trying to spread population around).
This would majorly reduce the barrier to entry in my opinion, because a lot of people just want to browse, and don’t care about the federation aspect at all.
I guess another problem is, larger instances are more likely to be reliably up, if you randomly signed people up to a smaller instance running in someone’s bedroom thant they switch off at night then that user’s experience is going to be terrible, but if you combat this by only having large instances in that pool then the large instances get larger and smaller instances will essentially freeze at their current size because the main way of signing up would become this portal that assigns you to instances rather than specifically joining an instance. It might encourage the fediverse to become considerably less federated and a lot more centralised.
There is going to be an equilibrium between the number of users and the number of instances. At the moment, with 22 instances with more than 300 monthly active users, we are doing okay.
The fact that many on the internet haven’t gotten past the largest hurdle, creating a Lemmy account.
We’re currently at 462k created accounts.
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This one is my biggest challenge too… I wish there was, like, a “trial” instance that folks were automatically signed up for and then after 30 days they had to switch and find another instance.
Once you’re in the door it’s lovely, but that first barrier to entry scares people off.
I said this a while ago on another thread, but if I was a Dev on the project I would be working to create a website that automatically signs you up for an instance. The high level concept is instances would opt into this pool, the user would simply put in their username like any regular website, and then the system would create them an account on whichever instance was best for them (maybe based on ping/trying to spread population around).
This would majorly reduce the barrier to entry in my opinion, because a lot of people just want to browse, and don’t care about the federation aspect at all.
Which instances would you put into this pool besides lemm.ee and lemmy.zip?
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/ filtered by MAU
I’m definitely not the one to ask.
I guess another problem is, larger instances are more likely to be reliably up, if you randomly signed people up to a smaller instance running in someone’s bedroom thant they switch off at night then that user’s experience is going to be terrible, but if you combat this by only having large instances in that pool then the large instances get larger and smaller instances will essentially freeze at their current size because the main way of signing up would become this portal that assigns you to instances rather than specifically joining an instance. It might encourage the fediverse to become considerably less federated and a lot more centralised.
There is going to be an equilibrium between the number of users and the number of instances. At the moment, with 22 instances with more than 300 monthly active users, we are doing okay.