this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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While I won't necessarily disagree with the problem you have identified, I don't know if I agree with the proposed change.
The problem with abstracting how Lemmy and the fediverse works could result in people actually having a worse experience.
So the first thing to note, there's not really any moderation done for the join-lemmy instance list. Any instance that has a description and icon will be listed on that page.
Now imagine the scenario where a pro-fascist instance pops up. As a new user, you may be pushed to join that instance. And as a new user, who has had the fediverse abstracted from them, you're on that instance, the instance has been defederated from all of the decent instances, so you look around and all you see are racists, homophobes, and Nazis. A user subjected to that experience would walk away and say to themselves, "wow, Lemmy is a cesspool".
I don't mean to shut down your idea. Maybe there is a way to abstract the fediverse and still result in a reliably good user experience, or maybe rather than abstract it there's a way to educate users better. Or maybe a little of both.
I really appreciate your take. It's definitely a valid concern. The good thing about this,is that because Lemmy it's not a company, decisions and changes are more discussed on the community.
Regarding the issue that you bring to light with the idea I propose,maybe the join-lemmy instance list can only show instances that are federated? Again it will still allow advanced users to use a custom URL to join to a custom instance.and because (as far as my understanding goes,please correct me if I'm wrong) new instances are not federated by default. The mayority of the community will have to have agreeded to the communities on the list to some extent. In that case I personally use jerboa for mobile,and the idea of having multiple accounts sounds great too.
On regards to educating users better,that actually is a good idea. When I hear the term "feddiverse" I think that maybe a visual representation of the Lemmy federation can be helpful to understand the whole thing. Maybe an interactive map when you join to understand what's your "home" instance. Hell maybe we can take a page out of Nintendo Pokemon go and make a little questionare to suggest a instance for a new user to join.(again this will be a suggestion and they can always join a custom instance or redo the questionare). This will make it easier for the run of the mill user to visualize the concept and streamline the process