Ghostalmedia

Back where?

None of the above.

I’m the humble contrarian.

You might have a good point, but you’re being self-righteous and smug. I’m ordering a turkey sandwich because your lack of humility irritates me and I want to piss you off.

Exploding heads is a good example of a far right instance. A lot of folks have defederated from them. The biggest instance, Lemmy.world, just cut ties and they’re furious.

Hiding subscriber counts is intentional at join-Lemmy.org. They were being displayed about 2 weeks ago, but new users saw them, viewed actively as a form of social proof, and only signed up with large instances.

Problem is, those large instances are starting to break now. They can’t scale fast enough to meet demand.

Moreover, if you signup for a small instance, you can still subscribe to communities from another instance. Communities are shared between instances.

IMHO, we should be displaying stats like response time and integration with the federation network. That’s what is actually important for most folks. If you only focus on local activity, you’re going to have a bad time.

Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.

Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.