The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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linux users
There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.
I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?
Thoughts?
IMO things would work a lot more smoothly if the official website had a button that made an inversely weighted random selection from the top 20-50 “general purpose” instances and just sent you straight to their site or signup pages. To those who are unwilling to do extensive research, picking from the list they have is basically just choosing randomly anyway.
I think this is not really inline with the philosophy of the main Lemmy devs. For this to happen, I think someone else would have to do the work of creating the random selection service. If it was popular enough, maybe they’d put a link on join-lemmy.org
Well, they already have a list if popular instances and even curate a few “recommended” instances on top of that. Giving the option to pick one randomly automatically doesn’t seem like a stretch.
There are differences between the servers, though. Instead of picking randomly, it should ask you a few questions about what you value and what you intend to do.
I made this account to look at NSFW stuff, for instance. I had read that lemmy.world was the biggest server and it checked all the boxes of allowing NSFW content, downvotes, community creation, etc.. “OK, should be fine.” Only after trying it out did I realize that all NSFW thumbnails are blurred and you have to manually open each one, and lemmynsfw.com has a patch to fix that. So if you’re making an account for that purpose, it should recommend that server.
Likewise, the admins of different servers have different goals and rules. beehaw is expressly created to oppose rationalism(???), for instance, and disabled downvotes and has heavy moderation of things that don’t fit the admins’ beliefs. The Lemmy sign-up process should give examples of the kinds of things that have been banned/moderated and ask if that’s your thing or not your thing.
It should be kind of like https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/
(Also, server administration costs matter? Servers that are hosting lots of images will be more expensive to run. If you’re consuming all that content with an account on another server, is that fair?)
You make some good points. A more complicated chooser could be a good idea. I just went for something simple.