It’s controversial. It was created by the creators of Lemmy and has some techbro feelings about a lot of stuff. I’m not trying to start an .ml fight, I’m against pushing for any particular instance.
I would recommend new users to stay away from the biggest ones and steer towards one level down. You want enough communities and instances to line your front page, but the big ones are big enough. Let’s spread the load.
I don’t think you need any communities to line your front page until you get subscriptions going. I think going a level down from the biggest ones is still too big and will still lead to giant instances as they inevitably grow over time. Same with putting practically all the communities on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml.
That’s concentrating a lot of people and content in a handful of places, and slightly-less-centralized is still effectively centralized. No instance admins should have that much power.
I was referencing to when I signed up for Lemmy. I really missed the front page of r/ and was looking for that. I didn’t realize that the default would be so dead and also, I was on a really small instance, so the page was suuuuper dead since nothing was referenced yet. People can switch to smaller, but we don’t want to overwhelm them or make it look way worse populated than it is. I get your concern, but that’s why I recommend it to be mid level. You may not care if your front page is dead, but the newbies do.
I get that. I think it is therefore incumbent upon us and the people running instances to inform new users how to do this new thing.
I’m not saying your way is wrong, just that I think inertia will ultimately win out over ideology.
Anyway, have a lovely day!
No matter what advice you give people, they’re still basically going to do what they want. Many will prefer to join larger servers, and some will always prefer smaller ones.
Honestly I think we should worry way less about this, because Lemmy is FOSS and we have enough solid instances already. People will naturally find their way and if larger instances get power drunk, people will leave. We don’t need to try to orchestrate and fine tune what instances people use. Let them do what they want, and trust that the decentralized and redundant federated structure will function as intended.
It should only come into play if large instances actually can’t keep up with their userbase growth from a technological standpoint. But again that problem solves itself because they can just close sign ups.
and if larger instances get power drunk, people will leave.
Will they though? I’ve seen people wanting to leave the bigger ones and don’t know how to transfer all of their subs and stuff.
