I feel like a much talked about criticism of getting started with Lemmy is that the ‘average person’ doesn’t understand it. I see a lot of technical people, myself included, use words that the ‘average person’ shies away from. Mentioning concepts like servers and Fediverse requires some background knowledge. I propose we start using ‘providers’ instead of servers, as it helps understand the function of it instead of the implementation. There might be more words that could be confusing, so let’s have a conversation about them. Are there any you recognize as being able to be simplified, or is this a non issue?
The biggest hesitation point for me was “instance” - it’s an odd choice of word IMO, and it made me immediately start thinking “I don’t know what that means, I don’t want to look stupid, I don’t want to get it wrong, I don’t want to make the wrong choice…” etc, etc, etc…
I got past it (obviously, since I’m here) but I think it’s something that could be better.
Particularly (and I realise that this isn’t the only use case) for people considering coming from Reddit. They understand that the structure is Reddit.com/subreddit/post/comment
Obviously comments and posts match up between Reddit/Lemmy, and “communities” are basically the same as “subreddits” so that’s ok.
But “Instance” doesn’t really have an equivalent, especially when you consider “Lemmy” to be equivalent to “Reddit”
In a way though, I feel like Lemmy is not equivalent to Reddit really. In fact Reddit would maybe be more equivalent to an instance - except that it’s the ONLY instance in that particular space. Whereas with Lemmy, there are loads of similar and interacting but nonetheless distinct 'Reddit’s
Maybe the metaphor for new users needs to be, imagine if there were dozens of 'Reddit’s, that were independent of each other, but which could (usually) talk to each other, so you only needed to join one to see (almost) anything on any of them.
I dunno, maybe this is all nonsense, I’m just kind of musing on it as a very new user of Lemmy who is enjoying it but find it hard to explain in a way that appeals to people stuck at the same hesitant stage I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Your metaphor of multiple instances = multiple “Reddits” is exactly how I think of it as a layperson!
A few other people use the email metaphor, but I found it not as digestible since email is not a forum.
Yeah, I also got a particular problem with the word instance, as it signals to me there would be different content in one that is not accessible for the others. That’s how it reads at first thought. But this is obviously not the case for Lemmy. It is all shared. That’s why I like the word provider more. Gmail is an email provider. Lemmy.ml is a Lemmy provider, same as lemmy.world .
Ah, I like that - a Lemmy provider, where Lemmy is not a place but a type of thing/service, like “an email” or “a website”