As a person who has come and gone as a casual linux user a few times i have had multiple chances to experience being a new user. I have used mainsream distros and niche distros.

Agree popularity is the #1 factor to consider. You need help to get you over the first humps and having a huge existing archive of other people working through issues on forums, tutorials, etc is gold. And innumerable channels to pose questions if you need personal help.

Your first linux install is like your first date. You will probably not marry and spend the rest of your life together. No need to agonize over it passing notes and getting your fortune told. Just go for it and move on.

I think you should add that the arch docs excellent regardless of what distro you use and are beginer friendly because i actually avoided them for a while assuming theyd be written in 1337 speak and only complicated arch stuff.

They are like town full of holograms of buildings in other towns.

Its not like email because when you open your email you dont accidentally wander into another email server where the only way to reply is by copy and pasting a nonobvious code and searching through an interface that isnt identified and doesnt work.

Email server were totally invisible to users and i wish everyone would stop bsing to the contrary. It is a backend conparison not of utility to end users.

the admins should put a link at the top to a search or version of the feed or something that filters out all posts with “reddit” in the title or body or linked article to show what the site is like when it isn’t consumed with gossip and drama.

because spammers and bad actors are motivated exclusively to get something by joining the community. they are willing to put in the work in anticipation of attention, traffic, sales, whatever. it is their job. they will also try over and over to figure out what they need to do and then exploit their method of entry when discovered.

on the other hand, a person who might have a more collaborative relationship with a community is considering both the benefits and the costs of joining. they are wondering if anyone will be interested in their contribution, and if they will get relationships, feedback, learning, good feelings, whatever.

If you need to solve several puzzles to gain entry, and you aren’t a puzzle solver kind of person, it is a very loud message: “we are not interested”. A person who is receptive to social cues will pick up on that and draw the inference that their time is better spent elsewhere. and being receptive to social cues is one of the qualities that makes a person a good participant.

Sounds like in your case, a person would be correct in that conclusion. All I can say is I think that is erroneous at the platform level. I think it’s good to have focused places to go that meet different needs and have various expectations set. and as a user you should spend your time where it suits. But there isn’t like a magic puzzle to determine how interesting a person is. Personally I find the nerd parts of reddit to be the most easily replaceable. Here we are, and on many other forums as well. But there are all kinds of little interest communities populated by people who can’t just spin up a server, who will not be so able to re-find each other and those were very cool and now they are gone. If reconstituted it will be on some walled garden proprietary service.

the OP is about fediverse replacing mainstream social media. self hosting is not viable in this context.

Well the specific problem you have here, i would say that is an issue. They might not focus on it if it is non reproduceable or fixed by refreshing. But that is for the devs to triage.

Some floss projects have a dicussion forum to make general suggestions or as questions. I imagibe there is such a thing here on lemmy if not on github.

But ui suggestions can be issues. For example some reddit ppl (like me) have been confused because the add comment box is at the bottom of the thread instead of the top. I think that would be a fair issue to open. Or if you think the top menu bar should be arranged differently. Or if the colors are unreadable, etc.

Projects that only want certain kinds of issues reported, they should create a document explaining this.

An awful lot of discussion about what to replace reddit with has mentioned “the UI” as a major barrier to this so I hope the devs would be receptive to feedback. But they dont have to and shouldnt take every singke suggestion because it would create a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation.

looking at the instructions, I am not sure it is something a casual user can implement. I think you’d have to have admin access to the server to implement this.

perhaps the lemmy project could design an interface allowing users to import subreddits in this way on instances which allow it. the cost and risk associated with this could be non trivial.

Good to know there are already some archives. Do you think they are the correct format?

Even in the best case scenario I probably don’t have the breadth to write something PR-ready but an issue with notes would probably be doable. (Unless the existing docs are already docs are already perfect, which they could be.)

I mean if we want people to migrate to lemmy, the thing to do would be to just start cloning all the subreddits… “Hey everyone you can pick up where you left off.”

hmmm all good thoughts. I would like to see about trying to do some stuff locally without discussion to see if it is viable for me at my level of skill and time availability. If I can get a dev environment running and figure out the basic tasks involved then I would probably start discussions about what I might do.

There doesn’t seem to be much prior issues, especially kbin, on this topic, unless it is in a separate repo that I am not seeing.

I am guessing that neither project anticipated it was about to get slammed and may not be ready to deal with that on the server admin side and also be managing bug requests and onboarding new devs with all kinds of ideas.

Thanks! Just to check is the correct docker instructions here?

I also found this page Theming Guide, so I guess the way to do it would be to copy an existing theme and work on that?

right but at least that way people wouldn’t show up to an empty room. the content would be familiar and set the vibe.

so a new community can hit the ground running with the thousands of posts of advice, problem solving, experiences, that made the old one valuable.

no need to apologize! I just want you to have a good chance to get your question answered. ;)

I am not sure how to clearly crosspost here…

I tried to make it clear but just in case I didn’t manage to, this is a cross post of someone else’s post on kbin. I personally do not know anything about this but I thought it would be of interest. Maybe someone else will have some insight but if you click the post you can see the original with lots of comments.