Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there’s a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
I agree about the user interface, but the rest I’m not too sure about. If you recommend new people just join lemmy.world then they really won’t need to know very much about the Fediverse. The front page will work as expected, the Hot sorting algorithm will work okay and their instance will already be connected to most communities due to its size. However, you’re furthering centralisation then, which is the dilemma.
Knowledge of the Fediverse and tolerance of clunky operations are mostly needed if you join a smaller instance. Learning to find smaller communities by searching for
!community@adress.tld(which doesn’t work in all apps and sometimes needs to be done more than once) for example is not a good experience for newcomers, particularly those not tech-savvy. And sorting by Hot does not work well on a small instance.Ideally the onboarding process could integrate lemmyverse.net somehow and give new users a suggested list of popular/active communities to start off with, so they can immediately find some places where discussion is happening without drowning in the memes of /All.