Hear Me Out: We Probably Need More "Closed-off" Fediverse Servers
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Wow I was interested to hear what your opinions were but nevermind after that comment.
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It kind of does matter which instance someone joins, because not everything is federated with everything else.
But that's not really the point. The point is that potential new users think about joining "Lemmy" only to find a big list of servers that they don't know anything about, and that scares people away. Giving them an invite removes the need for them to choose anything at all.
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The difference there is that Gmail was offering something (for free) that nobody else was at the time: the linear, conversation-based display of back-and-forth emails which we're all used to now, and a whole gigabyte of storage. Everybody already had an email address when Gmail arrived on the scene, but Gmail was, from a pure usability perspective, better than the rest. People wanted access to that.
For an invite-only Fediverse server to be especially attractive, it needs to have some reason why access to that server specifically is more desirable than going to any of the tens (hundreds?) of alternative servers that offer literally exactly the same thing. Unless they start adding features the others can't provide (which is close to impossible in an open-source project), what's the benefit?
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Nobody is going to wait for an invite when they can just join any server.
well if they look hard enough to realize this then that's a good thing, so I think it works out
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Don't take yourself so seriously or you'll end up like the guy above.
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I think when you give the invite don't say "Lemmy" just say the name of the server
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Don't have too much of an opinion on your proposed solution but I certainly got frustrated trying to figure out how to even get started the first time.
The whole process of trying to find a list of options was a PITA to begin with.
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Being exclusive works really well. Like getting VIP access makes people feel important.
It's what made Facebook cool. When only selected schools were allowed to join, students, faculty, and staff felt important.
I know they needed to grow, but keeping it just for college students would've kept its cool factor for a lot longer.
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Fuck that I died drinking fizzy lifting drink like a boss
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Other than the benefit of being part of a more tight-knit community, you're taking one of the biggest points of onboading friction away by giving them a code instead of asking them to pick from a list of servers they know nothing about.
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Floated straight into that big metal fan up top and gibbed like a half-life NPC, eh?
There are worse ways to go.
I did edit my post a bit by the way. Don't blame me for being cringey. I'm neurodivergent (or something, I'm not a doctor).
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If that's something you want to try out, then set up an instance and try it out.
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For an invite-only Fediverse server to be especially attractive, it needs to have some reason why access to that server specifically is more desirable than going to any of the tens (hundreds?) of alternative servers that offer literally exactly the same thing. Unless they start adding features the others can’t provide (which is close to impossible in an open-source project), what’s the benefit?
Most people don't even know about Lemmy or the Fediverse lol, you basically trick them into thinking it's something exclusive and then they join, that's a success
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We can do both tho. Like Tildes but open if people want to "brave the trouble" of selecting a home instance or whatever.
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Maybe this is a me problem, but especially on the threadiverse side (Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed), how much are we really in tight-knit communities based on our servers? I'm from Fedia, but I don't really interact with Fedia people any more than I do anybody else, or even bother to take notice of where other people are from, unless they say something especially goofy. Communities in the "subreddit" sense are more likely to feel tight-knit than servers
I definitely get how allowing people to skip choosing a server is good for some types of potential fediverse users, I just don't think Gmail works as an analogy for that. When Gmail was in its invite-only era, people weren't paralyzed by choices of providers, they specifically wanted the one that was the best, and that was Gmail.
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I've never run a fediverse server of any kind, but do Lemmy, Mastodon and the other big projects already support invite-based registration using codes?
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I agree honestly, swapping to invite only being federated together, with onboarding could work, could be abused like anything but itd be a way to avoid trolls in the invite onty servers and figure out whos bringing them im
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You can send this to your editor as well: that was a very blunt and forceful way of putting it. I could have been a little more constructive with the criticism.
Ultimately I read through it so clearly it wasn’t that bad lol
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I think making your own instance is a big enough barrier to entry to avoid trolls, fediseer exists but has issues if you change your domain but use the same ip.
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I don't think Lemmy has it (there is an open issue for invitation links that I don't believe anyone has worked on). I don't think MBin or Piefed have it either. Not sure about Mastodon. The beauty of FOSS though is if someone wants it bad enough, they can implement it themselves.
