It stroke me that saying things like “First, you have to choose a comunity to join the fediverse” might be a better way to ease onboarding nwecommers than “First, you have to choose a server”.
Although the latter might be technically more accurate, the former is what people might
- understand better;
- ends up being what they’re really doing;
- frighten them less;
- reinforce the “community” contribution aspect;
- lead them to better understand the federated aspect as they realize that communities are not isolated and can talk to eachother.
What do you think?
“Let me know in the comments bellow…” - just kidding!
Even setting aside the fact that the term community if already in use in the context of Lemmy or the fediverse in general: I really don’t agree that you’re choosing a community. For the vast majority of things it makes no difference what instance you’re on. That’s the whole point. While I made a conscious choice for my instance, the selection was almost completely irrelevant for 99.9% of my interactions.
You probably shouldn’t pick one whose ideology goes completely against yours, and you probably shouldn’t pick one that’s heavily defederated (for whatever reason), but that’s about it.
They being said, if they have “special interests” and are coming here to mostly talk abouta specific topic, choosing a fitting instance is at least a good idea and may have more impact.
I disagree. I think you’re placing your specific use-case as someone who regularly scrolls by all or subscribed as the only one, when in my opinion local scrolling has a lot og fun for specialized instances. Two comms on different instances with the same subject are going to have different content and responses, and that’s nice! Plus, some have their own emotes, special features, only allow upvoting, etc so they have differences there, too.
You might be right about being able to do almost anything whatever the instance you choose, as long as you already figured it all out, but having an account at a lemmy server, and two at two different mastodon servers, I do have the feeling that the presence on any of them is a different experience.
Don’t forget that what most people’s experience on the fediverse comes probably via mastodon and that they start by getting most of their content via home and local feeds. Federated comes third, i guess.
I am still struggling to find content on some of my preferred topics…