this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Asklemmy
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Any time I’ve brought it up everybody glazes over the first time I say the words “instance” or “federated.” I’ve tried the email analogy, but they lose interest immediately.
Call them "communities", not "instances", that might work better
Perhaps there's a better term, because "communities" already means something else here. Last thing we need is another Discord-calling-groups-'servers' mess.
"Homes" could be alright? or even "towns"?
"Communities" would work well because most people understand that it describes a group of people with similar interests which is basically what Lemmy instances are (whereas "instance" sounds borderline meaningless to most people as if you're trying to push them onto a tech project they don't understand). The Lemmy "c/" could be called "subcommunities" or "sublemmies" or something like that which would help people who are familiar with Reddit understand what they are as well.
This made me think about my struggles with trying to learn moves in fighting games.
The tutorial can’t tell me the move with actual button combinations. No. Instead I have to read it as punch + kick + grab first. And because I’m a friggin’ noob, I have to try to interpret what buttons those actions are.
How is this relevant? It really isn’t, the more I think about it. Bad comparison. Ah well. At least you know how sad I am at fighting games now.
Magic box is magic. Anything else hurts most people's brains.
In a way, it's impressive we got this far technologically before we started losing the plot, considering we evolved for the pointy-sticks-and-fire level.
Yeah it's an annoying stumbling block. Blue Sky "fixed" that by only having one instance.
It feels like there should be a sign up page that just gives users a default instance (randomly selected from the top 10 maybe), to avoid the problem.
I suppose we could "fix" it in a similar way by inviting people to a specific instance instead of pointing them at join-lemmy.org.(Although that site has improved massively since the last time I saw it.)
Don't even mention instances or federation, just say "hey you should join me on ".
Once they are using it, that's the first hurdle, and they'll notice pretty quickly that there are other servers that all (mostly) talk to each other.
Try 'non corporate reddit that isn't full of bots, and you can block assholes.'