This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

  • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Do you think ‘normies’ (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?

    • VantaWhite@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m an over-50 white Southern lady with no tech skills and I’m loving it. The apps help, and I’m sure I’m missing out on something, but it honestly isn’t that hard to figure out in a general sense.

        • VantaWhite@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In my case, like so many others, I’m a Reddit refugee. I was mostly a lurker over there, but I spent enough time to know things were going all the wrong ways. They had some good explanations of what Lemmy was and how to use it, and that’s how I got here. Others have pointed out that us old folks were used to Usenet and other similar things so maybe this isn’t all that alien. Also, fuck spez.

            • VantaWhite@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It was actually the other way around - several of the posts on Reddit about where to go next explicitly mentioned lemmy.world, so I started there. I wandered around for a bit and then looked for apps that offered something similar to the Apollo experience. There are a lot more out there now but Memmy works for me, so that’s where I am.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      One of the things up next on my agenda, is to re-do join-lemmy.org . We have the mockup for it done, I just need to complete it.

      Also as someone who grew up before the “use this single US-based site to connect to everything”, I don’t see how lemmy is too different from older forums. You go to a site, click the signup button, and wait for approval / log in immediately. You don’t need to know anything about activitypub, federation, or the fediverse to sign up and start using a lemmy site.

    • mycroftholmess@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I think an already established player like Sync or Boost should provide an experience that hand holds newcomers, by leaving little to guess work.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      For me its already a huge success that Lemmy got where it is today, with over 50k users. If you had told me that a few months ago, I hardly would have believed it. When I started working on Lemmy, there were a couple dozen active users at most, yet the project didnt die. Instead it kept growing and growing steadily. So I think it will keep growing, and there will be more improvements which make Lemmy more accessible for normal users.