A bit of an idealist and fond of empathy.
Can respond in English, Suomi and broken 日本語.
I feel like there could be a button to simply sign up to a random instance from a curated list.
The site could essentially offer an easy (default) path that would tell you in the simplest possible terms (preferably with pictures) what Lemmy is and enough about federation that the user is aware that it’s normal to have multiple web addresses, they all just access the same network. It would then offer two buttons, one would take the user immediately to a recommended instance, the other would fork them to the “advanced” path, allowing them to pick an instance with all the bells and whistle options and access more detailed information about federation etc.
“Sign up to a recommended instance (server)” and “learn more first”/“advanced options” buttons, perhaps?
I would urge anyone on the verge of quitting Lemmy due to this to check out either beehaw.org or sopuli.xyz. There’s a (still small but) active effort in providing general instances and contributing general content in a less politically hostile environment.
One of the biggest, if not the biggest benefits of federation is that you can easily change administrators while staying on the same network.
Only Gargron wants to run a flagship instance. Lemmy devs have made it very clear their instance has certain specific purposes and that they don’t intend it to be the main instance. I’m just wondering if we should remove the invite-request friction for a little while in Beehaw and Sopuli to take the weight off of lemmy.ml and so that the admins there can keep federating with Lemmygrad if they really wish.
It would probably be best to recreate some of the communities made in lemmy.ml elsewhere and actually contribute there. I really think your best bet is to just contribute elsewhere.
The claim for “mob manufacturing” seemed baseless, but the ban itself demonstrates said bias when a person with a barrage of hateful comments continues to get nothing. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt ban bias in lemmy.ml, but is definitely the most flagrant example of it.
Sometimes I get downvotes without knowing why and no one is replying me what’s wrong with my words.
Further ruining the conversation when you can simply press a button to devalue someone’s opinion without contributing anything yourself.
And yes, they’re used as agree/disagree buttons and it cheapens the conversation.
The entire purpose for downvotes in Reddit was to allow people to weed out comments that do not add anything to the conversation, but people of course misused it as an “I disagree” button. All the downvotes contribute is further ruining the conversational culture here by turning them in to gladiator fights of egos. Lemmy is actually just worse than Reddit in this regard when its downvote feature doesn’t even have a stated purpose. Lack of downvotes alone is a good reason to support Beehaw.
Yeah, it really is the UI that does the job. A UI that truncates posts >500 characters behind a “show more” button already gets you closer to a microblogging platform.