As a longtime redditor but newcomer to Lemmy, it strikes me as odd that Jerboa shows only posts from the local instance in the home feed by default.
If we are to promote the use of less-burdened instances, and stress the connectedness of this federated platform, we should be displaying the collective content right from the start. Content scarcity is already a stumbling block for many converts, and purposely limiting the view even further doesn’t make much sense to me.
If there is a more technical reason for this default view, then I can understand the rationale, but if not I’m curious to know why this is the case. What are your thoughts?
Absolutely you can, but expecting a completely new user to even figure out what it means to do so is a big ask. Some users can’t even figure out how to login using the app.
From the viewpoint of user adoption though, it just doesn’t make sense to me to present new users with what is likely to be a very sparse “social network”, unless they have registered at one of the top 3 instances (something being discouraged by at least one of these top 3).
I think lemmy’s purpose was originally more geared towards each instance having its own profile. So you would switch between them to enjoy different types of content. That’s my guess anyway.
Ah, if that’s the case then that does make more sense. I admit I’ve been looking at this from the perspective of finding a public alternative to reddit, rather than a topical collection of forums.
With potentially millions of other users also looking for such a solution, I’m curious to see whether this movement is embraced.
I think it would be nice to have the app at first launch briefly explain lemmy and maybe provide choices with details about showing all instances by default, etc. With a way for power users to quickly skip of course .
That is fair enough. I’d open a Github issue for the devs to take a look at it.
I will have to disagree with you on both points.
Whenever you join an app, platform or start up a new video game, you need to go to the settings and set your preferences. This is something very logical at the beginning as you have no idea what to expect. Additionally the settings in lemmy/jerboa are very minimal. You can set them up in about a minute. Claiming this is not user friendly is not a valid argument to be honest since Jerboad doesn’t have them hidden. It’s users who ignore the settings.
Lemmy, kbin and mastodon all implement the same protocol named
ActivityPubbut they all choose to make their front-end fundamentally different despite having access to the same content. This ecosystem doesn’t do everything for you and it doesn’t claim to. People, including myself, found out about this ecosystem from external resources and not from lemmy itself. It took me about 4 minutes to figure out what to do and where as I actively wanted to figure it out. If people can’t bother for 3-4 minutes to figure things out(Even just clicking the Join button) then I don’t see what improvement any platform can do to improve this. If anyone clicks on the Join button the go to registration and then to login. It’s very different to reddit but very simple.