I think people should pay (way) more attention to the domain name when creating a Lemmy instance. This is, of course, for admins of instances.
Instances such as lemmy.dbzer0.com and lemm.ee and such are just so unfriendly, in the name, that I think they do a disservice to Lemmy. They end up splitting the community. Due to the weird domain names, there will be privacy.lemmy.dbzer0.com, but the domain is just so unfriendly that people will also create privacy.lemmy.world and privacy.lemmy.ml and etc and it just creates unnecessary friction.
If you are considering creating a lemmy instance, please, please, think of the domain name. You cannot change it later!
I think if you really examine the realities of what you are saying, you’ll land on split communities being fine. It gives people a place to go if there are rogue admins or mods.
No, it’s not user friendly but I also don’t think attracting every single person to Lemmy is a good goal. There are plenty of people on Reddit in happy to have stay there.
My claim is not that Lemmy should attract every single person. However, it does need to attract many many people. Here is why:
I think we all want to open a post about astronomy and read “Astronomer here. Here is what this post is saying:”. Or read a post about nutrition and have someone with actual nutrition knowledge talk about the topic at hand. Perhaps even the author of the paper?
Do you want a random guy who installed arch-linux commentating (probably a shitty meme) on a highly specialized topic about math? Or do you want Terence Tao leaving his thoughts? I want the later. In order to have that, Lemmy needs to be welcoming to everyone and not just to people who know how to install Arch.
I use arch btw.
I mean I hear you. And the experience can be made better, but where that clashes with decentralization, I’d rather decentralization wins.