This place has roughly 3,000 people and was intended to be an entire replacement for DaystromInstitute and StarTrek as they were going dark indefinitely. Well, within 4 days the moderators have walked back those statements and opened both subreddits up. I see no incentive for people to come to this website now and while a few may come here in the future, most people will go to r/startrek with 600,000 people.
Growing pains are a separate issue than the problems associated with “non tech minded people putting up with learning a new service”.
The first is a timing issue. Give it some time and the issues will resolve themselves as far as the average user is concerned. The second one implies inherent difficulties arising from the “tech mindedness” of the users and its interaction with the service experience. I’m saying that the average internet user today is “techi minded” enough, even if they don’t consciously know it, to understand how to use fediverse services intuitively, unless we overthink the introduction and scare people away.
It’s not sufficiently intuitive yet because not everything you can do is reachable by a link. For example, this instance automatically shows us many communities from beehaw.org because users from here have subscribed to them. However, we don’t automatically see every community there, and even if we browse their main page from this instance we don’t have a link to browse all their communities. It didn’t take me long to work out I had to browse beehaw.org from a separate browser tab to see all the communities I could search from startrek.website and subscribe too, but that’s too many steps for most people.
If I browse to a beehaw community from here and click the posts linked from their sidebar I end up on pages on their domain that don’t know I’m logged into startrek.website. It just doesn’t work seamlessly unless you’re very web savvy or have even done some webdev before.
I say all this as someone who likes it here. I’m going to stay and I’ve pinned a browser tab here to replace my reddit tab, but Lemmy needs some dedicated work before people other than the rebellious, adventurous, and ancient net nerds like it.
yea the design of the federation aspects of it is particularly not well thought out.