IMO, Lemmy would gain far more users if you were able to create a user account without having to be approved by a server first.
If communities want to remain invite only that’s fine. But I really, really think you guys should decouple account creation from the requirement of being approved by a server. It’s a barrier to entry that imo will prevent many users from registering.
Edit: If not global auto-approving of user account creation, I think what would be a more reasonable request is an indicator of whether a server auto-approves account creation or whether it is invite only.
I’m merely thinking about growing Lemmy’s popularity. Considering that there will soon be a large exodus from reddit, removing as many barriers to entry to the Lemmy platform/ecosystem will speed up adoption and more of the users leaving reddit would be likely to join Lemmy.
Any artificial barrier to entry will dissuade some portion of users from registering, regardless of how small that contingent may be. I do not want any user to be dissuaded from joining the ecosystem because there is a mandatory invite only requirement for all servers. I’d prefer for the Lemmy ecosystem to grow as fast as possible.
Decentralized social networks rate of adoption is already very slow, and we can see that from the limited userbase of Mastodon which launched 7 years ago and has approximately 4.5 million users compared to reddit’s 1.6 billion. Yes, Mastodon launched in 2016 which is much later than reddit did, since reddit launched in 2005.
However, reddit has several orders of magnitude more users with only 11 years of additional time being open.
I’d just really like to see the platform take off.
I fear if there would be large influx of new users, many instances wouldn’t be able to keep up. I think currently the only way to scale an individual instance is vertically. I doubt that many of the admins are willing or able to throw much more money on it. Working across the federation with indiviual instances struggling with the load would then likely diminish the whole experience.
In other words: it might be an advantage if the growth doesn’t happen too quickly. Even though this is not directly the intention behind the registration process.