Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
Here’s the most interesting take I’ve found on this question.
https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/23/project-and-the.html
Good read. Onboarding and discoverability are the weakest part of the fediverse and need to be a high priority.
Apps should go as far as assigning new users randomly to a good general instance (vlemmy.net, lemmy.one, lemm.ee etc) if it means the user wouldn’t have to know about instances, and integrating lemmyverse.net’s functionality into lemmy would both go a long way for both I feel.
This is a terrible idea, and the defederation of Beehaw is the exact reason why this is a terrible idea. Don’t get me wrong, with the attitude of the Beehaw admins I suspect that Beehaw will constantly be defederating from a lot of instances over the course of its existence, but this comes with the consequence of people suddenly being locked out of participating in their chosen communities because “you signed up on the wrong instance.”
Which is something nobody should have to experience.
That’s why it’s important to make sure they’re good general instances that aren’t defederating everything else. Beehaw seems to be an exception in this regard.
Beehaw’s essentially walling itself off from other instances, and I think the vast majority of users would rather stay on the other instances’ side rather than one that seems to be staying small on purpose.
Instance migration is already a highly requested feature, and is a thing in Mastodon already. That will fix most remaining concern about being locked out of communities when implemented.
I feel the massive onboarding advantage of users not requiring instance knowledge by doing this vastly outweighs the few users who might not find some communities they like, most of which have alternatives in other instances anyway. And they could always just make another account until instance migration is in lemmy.
Great article! I appreciate how it addresses the commonly raised reasons and points to a way forward.