this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Technology
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How do you expect a newcomer who has no understanding of content federation to find these low-pop instances? Of course everyone's joining the main handful, they don't know anything else exists.
I'd imagine most people coming from typical social media don't even realize that instances are a thing when they sign up on one. They've heard about lemmy or kbin or whatever, so they go to lemmy or kbin or whatever and sign up. Once they learn how it works, they've already established a profile on that instance; they're not going to start over on a new one.
But do people know that? Not a rhetorical question, I only have direct experience with kbin and only a week's worth at that. I had only the very foggiest idea what all of this was when I came to kbin and signed up. I've learned a lot more since then, but I'm still brand new to this.
If I have no complaints with kbin, why would I be motivated to look for a new instance? Should I be looking anyway? What compelling reasons exist to shop around, as it were?
Seems like the natural progression of this sort of thing, no? Has enough time even passed to tell if this is a problem or not? This is a bit of an aside, but I feel like there's been a lot of doomposting the last few days about imagined future problems. Have we really had enough time to make any actionable observations?
I don't think that's particularly true. Reddit had plenty of people making multiple alter accounts for various purposes, and some of the third-party apps made it easy to swap between accounts. Multiple profiles throughout the fediverse doesn't seem a particular stretch.
Multiple accounts is not the same thing as abandoning your profile and instance to start over somewhere else. I have more than one profile right here on kbin, for example.
Regardless, you’ve ignored the entire rest of my comment, and kinda the whole point; people don’t know. How could they know? Where are they going to learn if not here, and once they are here, why leave?
Smaller pop instance admins such as myself could do a better job at advertising we are open for new people to register. It definitely feels weird for me to go out and advertise my instance though (since you know I would have to post on other instance’s communities for it to be seen)
It’d be cool if we had a dedicated place we could drop a post mentioning our servers so people could see. Advertising new instances won’t be a problem for now, but I could see it being an issue once bad actors get bots set up here.
I know you are on kbin. But on lemmy the join page lists all sorts of instances.
Others have mentioned the join page just tossing you on a random set of instances round robin style.