aaaa, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Consider your specific audience you are reaching out to.

Honestly the biggest barrier for entry into the Lemmy content isn’t choosing an instance. You can easily tell someone to sign up for Lemmy.world or kbin.social without going into detail about what that means.

The issue is that most social media users don’t want to spend an hour or two searching for communities and blocking bots. They want a feed that is appealing at first, that they can tweak incrementally as they get more familiar with the service and its content.

With that in mind, what people want is to know what makes the experience helpful to them right now. I think that boils down to two primary concepts: Draw people in to specific communities that are more accessible than their Reddit counterparts, or convince them why Reddit is not a good experience for them

The latter is a tough sell to someone who already is happy with the Reddit experience. And the trouble with the former is there’s currently not a great deal of communities that are clearly better than on Reddit. The few that I would say count are fairly niche interests.

I think the Lemmy and kbin software needs a set of default subscriptions for guests and new users. Something curated by instance admins to provide the best new user experience, while still allowing them to customize it from there.

For what it’s worth, I would expect most social media users not to care about any of the decentralization aspects. Putting too much focus on the “it’s like email” thing is likely to fall on deaf ears at first.