Herein lies a problem I’ve had for a while, actually. It’s hard to tell people about Lemmy, because “Lemmy” isn’t really a website, or an app, or even a platform, really. It’s a protocol that anybody can use. For instance, we’re not really posting comments here on Lemmy, as much as we are posting comments via Lemmy. Right now, I’m posting a comment on Lemmy World via Lemmy, from Fedia. The average new user is very quickly gonna get lost in the sauce with that.

So even the main recruitment page, “Join Lemmy”, is kinda misleading because how do you join a protocol? It’s kinda like saying “enlist with TCP/IP” or “create an account on HTTPS”. Like… what does that even mean to a user? It leads most people into thinking that “Lemmy” is some centralized community with a hub of some sort, which is ironically antithetical to everything Lemmy stands for in the first place.

I think one solution to this would be to stop referring to things as being “on Lemmy”, and instead use terms like “a Lemmy site” or “a Lemmy instance”, which I think would help articulate the fact that “Lemmy” is a piece of software and not the community, itself. So when trying to refer friends to join a Lemmy instance, we should use the instance’s name, instead of “Lemmy”. But this brings about another problem; how does an instance form an identity to begin with?

Take Lemmy World here, for example: What is LW’s “identity”? What kind of site is this? What’s it about? What is the community here for? It’s called Lemmy World, so is it about the Lemmy software? To the outsider, it just looks like an off-brand Reddit; which may be what some are looking for, but there’s no real identity to be found in that.

You do have some instances that are a bit more focused, however, and have a distinct “identity” about them. Unfortunately, a lot of those are defederated from the major instances because of those identities (Lemmy.ML, Hexbear, etc). But there are also a lot of really good ones like the solarpunk or literature instances, and interestingly enough, LemmyNSFW, which all have their own focused subject matters but are still part of the Fediverse at large. When you sign up to one of those instances, you know what kind of community you’re getting involved with. You’re there for a reason, just like everybody else.

I think Beehaw does a good job in this, specifically; even though they’re a “general purpose” instance much like Lemmy World, they have very clear guidelines and expectations for how users behave and what they post, which helps solidify its identity. If I tell you “think of a Beehaw user”, you can probably concoct an idea in your head about what that person is like. If I tell you “think of a Lemmy World user”… can you even narrow it down enough to create a caricature at all?

I don’t have any real point to all this, just rambling about some frustrations I’ve had for a while with the terminology of things around here. I dunno what the solution should really be.

I think making your own instance is a big enough barrier to entry to avoid trolls, fediseer exists but has issues if you change your domain but use the same ip.

Fair enough, but you sound like the type of bitch-made brat who didn’t return back the everlasting gobstopper. Just saying.

You could.

It kind of does matter which instance someone joins, because not everything is federated with everything else.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that potential new users think about joining “Lemmy” only to find a big list of servers that they don’t know anything about, and that scares people away. Giving them an invite removes the need for them to choose anything at all.

It does, though, because not every instance federates with every other instance. If someone is coming from Reddit, and they interact with a set of specific subs there, and they want to interact with the analogue communities here, they don’t want to join an instance like, for example Beehaw, that has very strict federation policies, or (probably) .ml or lemmygrad, where they’ll be exposed to stigma they weren’t aware of going in and which might not apply to them.

A list of servers with very open federation could solve this problem in theory, assuming new users knew to reference it, but that might not be what they want, either.

The invite code idea is actually solid, I think, assuming they’re handed out to people who have things in common with the target userbase of the instance, and not arbitrarily.

There’s also some instances that hold united views on specific topics, for example blahaj with trans rights, and someone arbitrarily choosing that instance that doesn’t hold those same views might feel that they don’t fit in.

Obviously anyone can just choose a new instance and move, but for a new user coming in, that’s a ‘quit moment’ in many cases. Giving an invite code to someone that leads them to an instance that at least broadly fits what they’re interested in could help solve for this.

Edit: I think having more instances that have specific themes and topics, like slrpnk or programming.dev (or pawb, for that matter) would help, too. Someone looking in from the outside might not understand federation, but if they see an instance geared towards a topic they’re interested in, they might be inclined to join it even if they incorrectly think that’s all they’ll be able to interact with.

I’m open to the idea but I’ve never run a fediverse server of any kind. I don’t have much web admin experience.

Do Lemmy, Mastodon and the other big fediverse projects already support invite-based registration using codes?

Come to think of it, even semi-open communities (like the kind that require users to apply to join) could benefit from a user invite code system as an alternate way to get people in without applying.

So not closed off as in non-federated, just invite only?

Yeah. We’re talking about using invites to onboard people onto servers.

So a barrier like the ones that have applications, but based on something other than fiktering who joins the community? Not only is that counter to the entire point of federation, but invite only approaches only works for closed systems. Nobody is going to wait for an invite when they can just join any server.

Would you rather be invited to an event or fill out an application?

There’s way less friction involved in sharing an invite code.

I also don’t think that closed servers are “counter to the entire point of federation”. Federation is about servers talking to other servers, it has nothing to do with how individual servers grow.

And if people don’t care to wait for an invite to join a specific server, and they’d rather take the initiative to join a different server right away, that’s fine too. They’re still in the fediverse either way.

The topic of sharing invite codes is geared towards the type of people who aren’t going to take that initiative in the first place. We get rid of the need for them to understand how the fediverse works by just giving them a ticket into some specific server. They can take it or leave it.

We can do both tho. Like Tildes but open if people want to “brave the trouble” of selecting a home instance or whatever.

Nobody is going to wait for an invite when they can just join any server.

well if they look hard enough to realize this then that’s a good thing, so I think it works out

Google+ did it and it didn’t work.

The difference there is that Gmail was offering something (for free) that nobody else was at the time: the linear, conversation-based display of back-and-forth emails which we’re all used to now, and a whole gigabyte of storage. Everybody already had an email address when Gmail arrived on the scene, but Gmail was, from a pure usability perspective, better than the rest. People wanted access to that.

For an invite-only Fediverse server to be especially attractive, it needs to have some reason why access to that server specifically is more desirable than going to any of the tens (hundreds?) of alternative servers that offer literally exactly the same thing. Unless they start adding features the others can’t provide (which is close to impossible in an open-source project), what’s the benefit?

Being exclusive works really well. Like getting VIP access makes people feel important.

It’s what made Facebook cool. When only selected schools were allowed to join, students, faculty, and staff felt important.

I know they needed to grow, but keeping it just for college students would’ve kept its cool factor for a lot longer.