Lemmy

I'm not sure I can add much value to the recommendations themselves, but I do believe the page needs to explain in relatively simply terms that that joining a particular instance isn't necessarily hindering access to any content, otherwise people will generally choose the most populous.

I'll be submitting my instance to be considered to the recommended list. I've thrown a nice amount of resources at my lemmy instance and i'm pretty excited to see how it will handle the extra load that is expected!

I think my server lemmy.world would qualify :-)

The admin team needs to be prepared for a large influx of users, both in terms of hardware and moderation

Reddit has almost half a billion users, so until there is horizontal scaling I would argue no instance is ready.

One criterion i would add is economic viability, Lets look at beehaw, it has about 1000 monthly active users and according to opencollective got about 1000$ this month (for some reason the opencollective page of lemmy can't show this stat), that puts him at the ARPU (active revenue per user) of about 1$ a user which is similar to reddit that has ARPU of about $1.02 (and was much lower in 2021, about 0.5$).

If your goal were wider adoption, having a big "sign up" button (with the server name on/next to it) that links to a random "recommended" general instance could be best. Put a "sign up on a different instance" button next to it, and a list of instances below that.

Of course - that's IF it's your goal.

I think Mastodon does this, but just a static link to mastodon.social instead of randomly rotating it.

Edit: that's what they do on the app - but not joinmastodon.org

I was trying to edit my comment and accidentally deleted it! D'oh!

If your goal were wider adoption, having a big "sign up" button that links to a random "recommended" general instance could be best (with the url/name clearly on the button). Put a "sign up on a different instance" button next to it, and a list of instances below that.

Of course - that's IF it's your goal.

I think Mastodon does this, but just a static link to mastodon.social instead of randomly rotating it.

Edit: that's what they do on the app - but not joinmastodon.org

Those are solid requirements to be listed on joinlemmy.org and I would also add another one about moderation policies prohibiting racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, Islamophobia, etc. Otherwise, if a user joins an instance that the "official" page recommends and discovers it's racists / sexist / etc, they'll see it as a problem with #lemmy as a whole, as opposed to just one bad instance.

And as we've seen on Mastodon, if a Black user goes to a site where racism is tolerated and quickly encounters racist sh*t, they leave and tell their friends; ditto for trans, queer, Muslim, etc. users having bad initial experiences. Once that happens a bunch of times the reputation becomes hard to shake. Much better to steer people to sites where they're less likely to have a bad experience!

Our server on slrpnk.net can very likely take some more users, but I am pretty new to hosting Lemmy and it's currently only me that has some time to managing the server and approve applications.

So maybe better not to add it directly to the recommended instances list.

Controversial idea: I think we should remove the "users per month" number on the instance list. It's confusing to newbies and encourages people to join a "large" instance when the number doesn't really correlate with actual server capacity.

Edit: And don't display the ones with 1 or fewer users. They are obviously private single user ones. If someone wants to start a public one, they'll be able to come get 2 or 3 others to join up and they'll pop onto the list.

Ideally the recommended instances section wouldn't be static. It would put a different instance in prime position for each user that visits... a poor mans load balancing I guess.

smaller general purpose instances such as sh.itjust.works

@nutomic certainly szmer.info, one of the largest instances for many years, and the only one in Polish

I've stood up aussie.zone primarily for Australians, but open to anyone. Same as poVoq, its just me at this stage.. but I've disabled community creation.