Was replying to a now-deleted post in which the poster asked for feedback on the contents and phrasing of a message they had used to promote Lemmy on Reddit. As the crux of my reply was recommending an instance other than lemmy.world to send new users to, I thought I’d rework it as a post of my own.
While @Blaze@feddit.org came up with good criterion for determining which instances should be recommended to newcomers, it seems that neither sopuli.xyz nor discuss.online has native third-party frontend support, something that may increase the likelihood that new users stick around. Although I don’t think Mlmym should be recommended—despite being an easy switch for users of the old Reddit interface—due to it lacking recent updates, thus likely to break if not updated for Lemmy 1.0, other third-party frontends such as Alexandrite, Voyager, Tesseract, and Photon may serve new users better than Lemmy’s default user interface.
Although country-specific, lemmy.ca is arguably the best option in this regard, supporting all five third-party frontends listed above. It’s also one of the longest-running instances, dating to June 2021, and is defederated from lemmygrad, hexbear, and other instances on the Fediseer censure list.
If a non-country specific instance is preferred, I also went through the instance list further to find another general purpose instance with a neutral name, sufficient defederation list, and support for multiple third-party instances. Endlesstalk.org is the next most active instance to meet those criteria, with support for Mlmym, Alexandrite, and Voyager.
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I tend to recommend Lemmy.cafe to avoid the tankie accusations.
Ah so it’s you, Pudding! I’m FunRun, doing my part and Lemmy shilling it up😂
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YSK that piefed.social works great too, since you can completely block instances just like defederation. They can’t downvote or see your content, and you cant do so to them either.
Wow that’s really neat. One of the main criticisms of Lemmy is that the block function isn’t strong enough.
Honestly it’s a silver bullet for me. I love the filtering in piefed, and just all the great featuers (as blaze said no apps though 😭)
No apps
Right i forgot. The API is close to finishing though, rimu confirmed it (they’re also porting thunder to it :D) so it’d be trivial to port already existing lemmy apps to piefed, since he said it’ll be similiar to the lemmy API.
I know, but still no apps at the moment 😄
How do you add gifs to a comment?
Desktop use it is then!
I don’t think presence of alternative UIs is a good reason to not recommend an instance. Voyager, alexandrite, and Photon, all have independent web apps (vger.app, alexandrite.app, phtn.app, respectively)
When trying to onboard new users though, the simplest process possible is ideal, so any confusion about using one website to load content from another, which is itself federating content from others, could be simplified via simply recommending an instance with built-in support such a frontend already.
Agreed. In fact i recommend using those standalone apps anyway since they’re usually more up to date than the instance’s versions.
For me there are two types of users
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mobile, who will use Voyager or another app to access the content
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desktop, who are more used to “look around” for better interfaces. We could maybe have sopuli and discuss.online add links to Photon and Alexandrite in their sidebars? @QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz and @jgrim@discuss.online, what do you think?
But you make a good point with Lemmy.ca offering all the alternatives. Maybe I’ll try recommending it for a while, and change the message to show the alternative interfaces.
I can add more. I have old.discuss.online right now but I can certainly add more.
Definitely think that it’s beneficial for any instance we recommend to have direct links to alternative frontends, even if they don’t implement it in their backends directly.
Although I deleted my primary Reddit account after the blackout, after some password resetting trial and error I found that I had an alt account I had forgotten about and had thus not deleted, so I’ll do my part in recommending and explaining Lemmy whenever I see a Reddit post without replies.
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I still think instances that are the least censorious are the best to recommend. At the end of the day you have no idea what communities someone will want to follow, so having access to everything is a plus.
Someone finding out a community they want to follow is blocked by their local BOFH because of some squabble is just going to make people go back to reddit, since it makes lemmy look no better.
It’s unfortunate that awesome lemmy instances broke, since it was good for comparing how much of the lemmyverse an instance had access to.
Are you sure that anybody (reddit users or otherwise) really wants to hear from 14 year old “communists” calling you “capitalist scum”, whitewashing genocide and supporting authoritarianism?
If anything, spam from tankie scum is likely to be a major turnoff for most users.
I think it’s good to maximize federation between instances that engage in civil, unbiggoted discussion. If you read the Fediseer censure logs, there’s clear, documented reasons for defederating from the instances it lists.
In the case of hexbear and lemmygrad, brigading and extremist views would dissuade most redditors from staying.
If you’re talking to a Reddit user, then they probably want a similar audience to that
It’s unfortunate that awesome lemmy instances broke
Oh, that is a shame. Why did it break?
It hasn’t been updated for the new API https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/issues/46
