[stereolambda]

If the goal is to talk about your interests with strangers (and not pull in your whole family and political and journalistic class), some minimal federation friction could be beneficial actually, as a soft filter. Maybe it's worth it to have some common pre-Eternal September spaces on the Internet, even it means not building unicorn empires.

The latter seems to be a mindset people aren't able to shake off for some reason, applicable to the given case or not. If a person can write and read two sorta coherent paragraphs of text for a internet forum, they are already on the level of being willing to learn and a little curious, above what the tech giants expect from their model user. There are enough of such people to have interesting and diverse discussions. Don't tell me Discord is easy to figure out. I'm not saying the devs should be working to make the experience easier, but it starts to be one of those topics where the discussion is meme-based.

You can tell search engine robots not to index your copies of different forums. I don't think they are viewable by default anyway? Avoiding small instances to avoid outages sounds like 4D strats to most users, who might prefer cosiness, personal connections and camaraderie, like on Minecraft servers, say.

[badtension]

The problem is discoverability. You don't know where to look for stuff or people. I wanted to check out this whole Lemmy thing and found almost completely dead (no comments) communities linked from their project page.

Where do I go? How do I search for something worthwhile? There's no central space to find it, compare communities etc. I was curious but now I am kind of put off.

[Paul-Craft]

Check out https://lemmyverse.net/communities

[badtension]

This looks amazing, thank you!

It just needs to be posted as a main aggregator at https://join-lemmy.org, or even better, on the right hand side panel on every Lemmy instance.

I know this would be a centralized database of communities (which is probably frowned upon in the fediverse) but I don't think there's a sensible way around it.

[pixl97]

Discoverability is a double edged sword. You'll find it, but so will every bot and scammer on the planet too. Then moderation will get ever stricter to get rid of the abusers and eventually the place becomes a mess for one reason or another.

[rakoo]

I'm sure spam bots and scammers aren't waiting on indexes to appear and do their own, so providing an index can't make them more problematic they already are.

Trolls, bullies and harassers though will have better access to you.

[badtension]

Reminds me of security by obscurity in cryptography, I don't buy it.

In principle this probably happens but the alternative is having no large vibrant communities.

[MichaelZuo]

Hence a real name requirement, and/or a real money pseudonymous account requirement, seems to be pretty much the future.

[pixl97]

Authoritarians are salivating at the idea of real name requirements.

[JohnFen]

Not to mention that such requirements don't actually do what their proponents hope.

[MichaelZuo]

Possibly, how does that relate to my comment?

[californiadreem]

I ran into this same issue. But I asked myself, if I passed through and left because no one was active, why not plant some seed content for the next person that passes through? I couldn't be the only one looking for smaller, more intimate communities.

I did this for a "dead" forum and after about a week of "squatting" there and posting for myself, other people started showing up and replying to it.

People should treat the digital silence of dead communities as an asset and free real estate to share their thoughts.

[stereolambda]

I checked and you can find a good number of communities by going to one of the larger Lemmy sites, clicking on the Communities tab and selecting All. If you want one directory from many instances (I assume this is what you meant by central space), someone would have to create it.

[OfSanguineFire]

I wonder if the rise in smartphones as people’s default device has indeed reduced the likelihood of gathering such knowledgeable and worthwhile strangers together. Even many people with intellectual acumen and adventurousness, who might have tried an alternative community, are using devices that discourage longform text and logging into obscure websites.

Case in point, I am a member of some hobby and travel communities where, a decade ago, many people had blogs where they described their experiences with rich, detailed text. Now those same people hardly even touch a keyboard and are content to maybe just post a few pictures. They also are more likely these days to engage in political battle, since political polarization is so much greater than it used to be.