We are at the cusp of becoming the #1 Lemmy instance, which is very exciting. But I wish there was a better way of informing casual users about lemmy and how easy it is to join and use. I don’t think most people need to (or want to) know the intricacies of the Fediverse, but it sounds overwhelming and complicated to them, and as a result they won’t even give it a try, when in fact joining lemmy.world to post on c/cats is no more complicated than doing it on r/cats. I wish we could put ads on YouTube, or on on a billboard or something to tell them/show them that! Lemmy (and Fediverse) will only truly be successful if/when the casual users join.
The more spread out people are, the healthier the platform.
Every instance is run by volunteers, so they can disappear instantly if the admins decide they don’t want to do it anymore. I’ve seen it happen first-hand to very popular instances. The good thing is that the platform continued to exist so communities just migrated to a different instance (or in my case, I just subbed to a different community)
Fair points. Mentioning lemmy.world was just a little bit of “instance pride”! But my main argument is that the majority of people currently coming to lemmy seem to be tech savvy and/or have already been on fediverse. And leaving the rest of the users behind wont work. Many of the greatest contributors to reddit had non-tech specialties that were valuable for commenting on specific topics (eg law, medicine, civil engineering, etc.). I have been wondering how we can show these people that lemmy is not as terrifyingly complex as they make it sound to be.