Not enough people here (it’s a network effect) and it’s way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
After going through the list of servers, I had to pick one of them. As someone who went through that whole situation with XMPP, I know that this alone is enough to make most people turn away.
Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
Since the page told me that if I didn’t hear anything back after 24h, I could consider my application rejected, I wrote another account application at feddit.de after waiting for about 48h.
The feddit.de account was approved, but I only noticed by my login working a few days later. I didn’t get any notification. That’s what I’m using right now.
After more than a week, I got an email that my beehaw application was accepted.
I don’t know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don’t understand what federation means in the first place.
Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
I’d just like to say sorry for the experience you’ve had with Beehaw, we’re trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it’s been a really hard time… We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there’s about 2k left)
not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn’t even including kbin users
also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they’re 4 people accepting all of them!
be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn’t a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it’s community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.
Sure, and Digg got its way with the redesign back in the day.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
I, for one, just signed up on this website specifically so I can leave reddit
Why isn’t Lemmy viable?
It’s not nearly as user friendly as reddit yet. People won’t spend the time to figure it out.
Not enough people here (it’s a network effect) and it’s way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
I don’t know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don’t understand what federation means in the first place.
Bro this is a skill issue
To reiterate what I said in the last paragraph;
Not everyone is a writer.
I’d just like to say sorry for the experience you’ve had with Beehaw, we’re trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it’s been a really hard time… We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there’s about 2k left)
not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn’t even including kbin users
also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they’re 4 people accepting all of them!
be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn’t a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it’s community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.