They have a explanation here. they claim part of the problem was banning people who are harmless and not homophobes (they show at least one comment ).

The website is already linking to google play store and apple store. right now apps that are purely web don’t have a platform to read reviews on . plus neodb lib.reviews are open source although they might not yet be ready for the task yet.

Besides Lemmy mainly gets promoted by word of mouth (eg people recommending it on Reddit)

I doubt that, any data? similarweb shows the top referring site for now is openalternative.co (although at least one of the referring sites mentioned doesn’t seem to make sense for me ).

If people want to review Lemmy communities, it would make more sense to make a Lemmy community for that purpose.

I think people would want to see average ratings. reading a community page means you only read 1-3 reviews and that sample size is too small and potentially biased. you could just run into people who hate a instance for some particular reason (and it’s not hard for me to think of reasons like that).

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

It costs real world money to keep that data. tbf i don’t think you would find a service that does not delete inactive accounts. iirc when i did a market survey to find a new email address basically all free providers didn’t guarantee keeping your data if the account is free and inactive.

Why not provide a option to use an a desktop app?. maybe also add a flatpak. self hosting seems kinda complicated and i am not sure what are the benefits of that.

Also a demo instance would be nice.

If its off by default that is a reasonable suggestion.

They report a score which is not very correlated with the number of tests passed (there was a big increase in the number of tests that pass in 2023 but the score barely rose). I could not figure out how to show the score for other browsers on wpt.fyi.

Lemmy has a similar number of active users and makes about 3K . That money would be good for the ecosystem and could help fund upstream projects (I am sure wine could use the money for example). But they will have to use fundraising methods similar to lemmy to reach that number (popup, good message etc)

The donate page is kinda a mess IMO to be honest. There should be one organisation to donate to otherwise this creates overchoice.

At this point, you have to wonder what the Lemmy dev team is focusing on.

See the 1.0 milestone for lemmy and lemmy-ui . you can see both what they intend to do and what they already did.

Looks like a mistake. feel free to open a issue if you want to: https://github.com/vegastrike/vegastrike.github.io

Sure people might downvote here but engineers care about facts. have you tried testing this in real world setting? working with moderators? what feedback did you get?

Right now this is experimental. you can’t just use AI and automatically expect it to always do a better job then the established methods.

What i am worried about is that the federation system is already kinda hard to understand. New users who are not hardcore fediverse nerds (Like me and probably the rest of the people answering this post). Could start thinking “what the hell is going on?!” and might think lemmy is obtuse and drop it.

Lemmy could at some point benefit from a UX study where new users volunteer to be observed while the software is first use (software companies sometimes do that). maybe that could verify there are no problems . adding a searchable FAQ and a introductory tutorial (saying something "this will take about 5/10/15 minutes) could help.

Also lemmy has some kind of plugin system. this actually sound like something where a lot of people will want to experiment with different methods (maybe even benchmark them in some way). maybe open an issue asking for the ability to extend sorting with plugins?

Have you looked at the state of how open source smartphone os projects are funded? Seems like not enough people think it is currently important. i saw no bump in funding since the announcement. I would say the best bet is trying to help one of these projects with fundraising and trying to educate or convince enough people it is worth investing in. and obviously donate if you can. Although to be honest even i don’t do that (i think i invest enough in FOSS).

Once i bought a phone i tried to pick one that is friendly for FOSS projects and went with a pixel (which grapheneos recommended). so voting or signaling with your wallet is an option.

I also think something like codeberg. where anyone can be a member if he pays fees that help fund the organisation and democratically elect a board that decides what to fund could be helpful. codeberg has a pretty good organic growth so that is encouraging but i don’t know if there is enough interest in that.

Any github or codeberg people can star?

Also if so many people want it. starting to fund raise money might be good. paralives is already making good money and because it is closed source there is a incentive to make modding harder (so they could sell improvements). Plus this sounds really hard and labor intensive. being able to work on it full time could help you stay motivated. even seeing people giving money might help you feel the work is really appreciated and its not just cheap words.

Its like restaurants . you could go and some menu items you like and some you won’t like. asking for a recommendation from the waiter is a pretty good bet.

Maybe a survey can disprove my opinion. but i would argue the option of having ads plus paying for the ability to remove ads is something most users would accept (even if there is a vocal minority). especially if you explain that researching and developing some forms of content (documentaries, video courses, investigative journalism) can take dozen of hours and is not feasible to do without getting paid when aiming for the highest quality.

That could be better then just restricting videos (mitra could also be a open source alternative to patreon).

Regarding mental health . avoidance is generally not considered a good thing. one of the criticism of why technology is bad for cognition is that it creates a very pleasant experience but solving problems and achieving meaningful outcomes in the real world requires delaying gratification and accepting negative experiences

Emotional regulation and resilience are skills. if you don’t get negative experiences you don’t get to practice those skills. this is why helicopter parenting where well meaning parents do too much for their kids end up creating psychological problems like lowered self esteem.

All those terms, “increasing shareholder value” , “no tracking”, “is billionaire proof” , “no venture capital available”. would be really hard to understand for anyone that is not a hardcore fosshead . even if they will understand understanding the benefits of these properties is not easy . reportedly the average age of a reddit user is 23, how many 23 year old know what “venture capital” and “shareholder” even mean?

Maybe lemmy needs something like a whitepaper or a manifesto.

In blender for example you receive prioritized support when you sponsor them.

There are also various rewards (like voting on features, exclusive access to discord channels, having a sponsorship section on the website that acts as something like an ad).

There are various guides for this. but that’s the shortened version.