Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there’s a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
One thing Lemmy is missing is a way to join that doesn’t require you to understand the fediverse - currently the barrier of entry is quite high. Also, there aren’t any great user interfaces yet, which makes the platform difficult to use.
Yeah. A good app is Thunder but still lacks key functionality like editing comments or proper Markdown rendering.
Also, if I see a link to another Lemmy instance’s post, I have no idea how to log in with an account on another Lemmy instance or another Fediverse service. Integrating OAuth-like Sign in with… functionality into ActivityPub would help a lot, especially if you get automatically logged into all instances whitelisted by your instance’s admins. However, that would require either a centralized server (which erodes Fediverse principles), cross-site cookies (which likely don’t exist for obvious tracking reasons) or a browser extension (which is browser-specific and an entry barrier for users, and could introduce security vulnerabilities).
Not sure if you’ve used it for a bit, but Thunder allows you to edit comments now
Edit: edited from Thunder
Liftoff works better in those situations, you always have the option to “see this from that instance”, it’s very good
That‘s been my main issue with Liftoff: This content was retreived via lemmy.world. You are not logged in there. Now I found the option. Thanks!
Now I just need a way to remove lemmy.world from the app (edit: you can by long-pressing it in the Accounts menu) and rid my All feed of duplicates fetched via different instances; then it will be the perfect app.
I agree about the user interface, but the rest I’m not too sure about. If you recommend new people just join lemmy.world then they really won’t need to know very much about the Fediverse. The front page will work as expected, the Hot sorting algorithm will work okay and their instance will already be connected to most communities due to its size. However, you’re furthering centralisation then, which is the dilemma.
Knowledge of the Fediverse and tolerance of clunky operations are mostly needed if you join a smaller instance. Learning to find smaller communities by searching for !community@adress.tld (which doesn’t work in all apps and sometimes needs to be done more than once) for example is not a good experience for newcomers, particularly those not tech-savvy. And sorting by Hot does not work well on a small instance.
Ideally the onboarding process could integrate lemmyverse.net somehow and give new users a suggested list of popular/active communities to start off with, so they can immediately find some places where discussion is happening without drowning in the memes of /All.
