I don’t think most people are going to take that second step though. Most people will look up the main website and choose something from there

I’m not sure this is user dependent considering this is on the admin docs page. For users to subscribe to a community on another instance, that instances admin has to allow federation with the other instance.

I just feel like the bare minimum is not strict enough; you could theoretically have an almost fully defederated instance while still having a listing and potentially getting user sign-ups from the lemmy home site.

I could in theory create two such instances, federate only with one popular instance, get both listed, then only federate with each other. Completely diminishes the default experience users will have on signing up to my instances

The screenshot is from this documentation page for administrating a lemmy instance

My biggest takeaway with open source projects is this:

Theres there’s a HUGE jump from being power user friendly to being user friendly in general. Significantly bigger than the jump from dev/contributor users to power users.

UX is something huge companies spend a lot of time and money on to ensure the layman can use the software well, something open source developers do not have the luxury of caring about from the get go.

Power users do not recognize the inbuilt muscle memory they have acquired over time to get around some of the more nagging aspects of the software and get frustrated with new users for not doing the same, while these new users get frustrated at things not being straightforward, or similar to some other software they’re used to.

IMO this push and pull is what is truly preventing a Linux desktop experience that is truly layman friendly. But when it works, and an open source project can slowly start putting more of their time into UX when the project is more mature, then it truly starts kicking ass.

Look at how far Blender has come since the 3.0 update. A lot of studios are straight up switching to it for a lot of work that was traditionally Max or Maya based. Obviously you still have some of the “old guard” who felt a little alienated with the sweeping changes from 2.7 to 3, but I feel blender is objectively better for most people since then.

TL;DR: OSS always deals with different competing needs for power users vs regular users, but given enough time things get smoothened out

What would you rather see happen with lemmy, if not wider adoption?