I think that to get more people to become interested in Lemmy, the onboarding process is going to be a huge stopping point. I’ve seen suggestions on how to change the service, but I think it can be solved just by how we present the information to new users who aren’t super familiar with the tech involved.

I’ve seen people explain it like email, but even as someone actively running a Lemmy Server, with years of coding experience, some of those explanations even confuse me.

I think it’s just a presentation problem, choosing a server should be explained as like choosing a digital home that suits your interests. For instance, if you live in the northeastern US, you might choose NortheastUSA.net as your home server. If your following a Reddit community migration, sign up where they are. From there, you can browse other servers much like you’d browse different subreddits, like hopping over to a NY Jets fan server if you’re into football. The main Lemmy.ml server is a good point to start if your unsure, but it shouldn’t matter in the end.

Over time, communities dedicated to general news, politics, or the best memes will emerge. But your choice of server, while based on your interests, is just your starting point - you’re free to explore beyond that. So what if in the end the best memes are on [email protected]? Maybe the best place for coding help will be [email protected]. The aim should be to make the server domain nearly transparent to the user.

If this sounds complex, users can think of their server as your internet homepage, a base from which you start exploring. For tech-savvy users, hosting a personal instance on a VPN like Racknerd, is a breeze if you’re comfortable with docker or ansible. I’m actually just hosting my own instance for my home and some friends, running on a $20/year racknerd VPN. Super easy to setup for anyone familiar with docker or ansible. I’m sure one of the web hosting providers will have a one click spin up before long.

To simplify navigation, we’d need a way to search across all servers from the app or site, without wrestling with server domains. Feddit has a great listing started.

We just need a good search, like if you’re looking for ‘python,’ you’d see the top 5 Python communities across all servers. Ideally, an aggregator would also be present, showing popular communities and trending posts from all servers.

If anyone has anything to add, or that I’m wrong about, please let me know.