[Closed] Moved to !fedigrow@lemmy.zip

It's a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they've heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or "vanilla". Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.

This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It's the same thing with mastodon.social.

I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.

The problem is, there aren't a lot of "general purpose" Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn't know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.

@otter@lemmy.ca, I wanted to ask you about something: I posted to !til@lemmy.ca in the past, but it seems that now the community isn't actively moderated, and on the other side !todayilearned@lemmy.world is getting a resurgence.

Do you think it is worth it trying to post to the lemmy.ca one, or should we go with the flow and post on the LW one to make it grow?

Regarding your last point, tools like Lemmy Federate make this less of an issue.

Other issues experiences by Aussie.zone: https://aussie.zone/post/9964509/11627914

Thank you @Baku@aussie.zone

spreading out a bit would be nice, although there are some things that could help some of these issues anyways

• federation: parallel sending per instance
• Federate lightweight list of communities to ease discovery / find remote communities (helps "every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance")

Communities on big instances have a chance to grow. So once it gets big enough on something like world, they could put up a movement post and switch the community onto a smaller server. I have a lemmy ml community but it only has 227 subs so its currently not worth moving. There are enough subscribers that some posts get upvoted and end up like with 25 upvotes in a hurry so they appear on the tops lists. Obviously, the more the community hits the top lists, the more people will see it and maybe subscribe to it.

Updated the post with history of LW controversial decisions

I am usually trying to encourage people to host communities on other instances (recently moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee, but sometimes it feels like fighting against the current.

What do you think?

Every time I want to post a politics article, I have to decide whether to post @lemmy.world (and exclude the Beehaw people and include the trolls and reach more people) or @beehaw.org (and exclude the World people and help the growth of a community that seems better, but reach a lot less people).

IDK what the answer is