Hear Me Out: We Probably Need More "Closed-off" Fediverse Servers
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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.
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So not closed off as in non-federated, just invite only?
Yeah. We're talking about using invites to onboard people onto servers.
So a barrier like the ones that have applications, but based on something other than fiktering who joins the community? Not only is that counter to the entire point of federation, but invite only approaches only works for closed systems. Nobody is going to wait for an invite when they can just join any server.
Would you rather be invited to an event or fill out an application?
There's way less friction involved in sharing an invite code.
I also don't think that closed servers are "counter to the entire point of federation". Federation is about servers talking to other servers, it has nothing to do with how individual servers grow.
And if people don't care to wait for an invite to join a specific server, and they'd rather take the initiative to join a different server right away, that's fine too. They're still in the fediverse either way.
The topic of sharing invite codes is geared towards the type of people who aren't going to take that initiative in the first place. We get rid of the need for them to understand how the fediverse works by just giving them a ticket into some specific server. They can take it or leave it.
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No hard feelings.
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Do Lemmy, Mastodon and the other big fediverse projects already support invite-based registration using codes?
you could just put the invite code into the signup application questionnaire, a server admin can make it say "Invite code here:"
the admins could keep a spreadsheet of the invite codes like in Google Sheets, keep track of who was given the invite code and who received it
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The beauty of FOSS though is if someone wants it bad enough, they can implement it themselves.
For sure. I've personally contributed to C++ FOSS projects before. There are a few big hurdles between idea and implementation though.
Personally I don't know enough about web development or the software stack involved in various fediverse projects to be of much help with implementation right now. So the only thing I can really do at this point in time is put the idea out there, whatever little that's worth.
