After having spent some time on Lemmy and learning of the intricacies of the different Lemmy instances, I think the landing page for the Lemmyverse could do with some streamlining. I remember that back when I joined, the only information I used to decide on an instance to join was the user count, the signup policy and the instance name. Now, coming from the instance with the best name, I can't say that I've regretted my choice, but for new people looking to join Lemmy, crucial information that would help them join the instance best suited for them is still missing.
To provide that information, I want to suggest the creation of multiple categories, in which instance owners are encouraged to describe their instance. Instances that provide a description for each category are then ranked higher on the join-lemmy.org website.
The following categories would, in my opinion, help new users decide on an instance to join:
Content Policy
This category could describe what kind of content the instance wants to specialize in. Whether that be sports, games, specific sports teams or games, NSFW content, meme content, etc.
Signup Policy
The website already shows whether an application needs to be filled out, but it doesn't show what is expected of the applicant. A category describing what exactly the instance would like to see in their new users would help those users decide, if that instance is for them or not.
As an example, an instance focussed on a certain language could inform users, that they expect an application in that language.
Community creation Policy
Here, instances could describe what rules they have around community creation. Small instances could, for example, clarify in this category, that they would only want to host niche communities without much traction at most. Other servers could specify that they would only want to host unique communities, not copies of or communities closely related to communities already existing on other instances.
Federation Policy
Here instance owners could clarify their stance on what other instances they are willing or not willing to federate with. To give an example, instances could describe their stance on federating with other instances hosting NSFW content, possibly illegal content (lemmy.world and /c/piracy), overly political content, and so on and so forth.
Lastly, some statistics could be added to show the health of the instance: Active user to inactive user ratio, active user to report ratio, active user/report to mod action ratio, community engagement ratio, uptime, server software version and so on.
With these categories, I can say that if I were to join the Lemmyverse today, I'd be able to make a much more informed decision on what instance to join.
IMO, in practical terms, 3 key things should imapct instance choice:
Content specialization really shouldn't matter IMO, because as long as the federation policy is OK for you, then you can participate in any communities, regardless of what instance they are on. In other words, even if you're super interested in french cinema, there is no need to centralize all users interested in this topic on a single french cinema instance. Thanks to federation, users from all instances (accounting for federation policy) should be able to become fully fledged participants in any french cinema communities.
Of the points I listed above, #1 and #2 are easier to include in an instance introduction, I'm not sure how to properly and reliably reflect #3 in any kind of overview. At the end of the day, I think most users tend to figure out their long-term home instance a while after they first join Lemmy, and quite often, it's not their original instance, so maybe it's not that important to emphasize the initial instance choice too much?
Hello, thank you for your comment!
I agree with most of it, except the following.
The local feed is still important for people to discover new communities. There is a reason most of the French speakers on Lemmy are on Jlai.lu, it's because it allows them to find other French speaking communities more easily. I say this for French, but https://literature.cafe is the same for books, and https://programming.dev for programming.
Otherwise, the local feed is wasted, and with the issues we currently have with discoverability of communities, it definitely helps.
I think community discovery can (and should) be improved for sure!
Currently it's true that you can use topic-centered instances for this, I do this myself as well, but I do think it has quite significant downsides in terms of creating pockets of centralization. For example, if you're a user who is ONLY interested in french cinema (or any specific topic) on Lemmy, and all of the related communities and other invested users are on a single instance, then for you, the experience is absolutely no different from any centralized platform - the french cinema instance admins have 100% control over your Lemmy experience.
But unlike really centralized platforms, the admins of topic-specific instances have no way to abuse their power. Specially if the topic instance is not the home to users, it's quite easy for dissenters to go and set a new home elsewhere.
IMHO, content discovery is still the main problem and something needs to be centralized to solve it.
It's interesting, because it happened in the past, but more instance shutdown than power trip: lemmy.film went down, so the community moved to [email protected]. Actually, I say that, but you are well aware ha ha
There is probably a balance between how much a community needs to be centralized for it to be livable, and how much decentralization we want to keep admins/mods from power tripping.
I'm a bit jealous of the Star Trek community, seems like they are so many that they can afford to create new communities every few months.