Imagine the following:
- Servers declare a target number of users/posts-per-day (enables programmatically detecting when other people’s servers are generally under/over capacity)
- Severs have a recommender list of other servers (whitelist), separate and more exclusive than their non-blocked list
Whenever someone goes to the sign up page, for example, on Lemmy.world, we:
- look at the recommender list
- find the server that is most under capacity
- have a very large iframe with “Sign up for Lemmy (using [under capacity server here])”
- have a small “No, I want to sign up specifically on Lemmy.world” option
AND, as a precaution against maybe-malicious takeovers (e.g. a Facebook server saying it has unlimited capacity and all new users getting forwarded to them) a server can set it’s own maximum recommender caps; e.g. “recommended” servers won’t be recommended if they’re above 10,000 users even if they claim they could handle more.
Thoughts?
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I like the idea and how it’s presented. Yes, I think this might work.
Then I asked myself why we need it and if we really lack tools to solve it.
What I mean is: Instances can already close themselves for new registrations. Or they can make their signup process less easy (for example by requiring a written statement why the user wants to join specifically them).
If instances don’t do that, would they opt into your system instead? After all, both depend on the instance to want to grow slower. In both cases, I’d expect those instances to become the biggest who simply accept any new signup for themselves.
The idea would be to not add barriers to entry for new users or require servers to advertise/add barriers to entry themselves.
I think we should ask the reverse questions;
- Why should severs have to manually advertise themselves and manually erect barriers-to-entry (which are both crude/slow techniques for hitting a target number of users) when Lemmy.world could almost instantly send them all the new users they desire, stop exactly when they’re full, and do it in a completely automated way?
- Why should new inexperienced users have to deal with barriers to entry and then have to search around for some obscure Lemmy instance on their own, when we could automatically guide them to an obcure server looking for new members?
New servers can still use their old/existing methods, but if they want they could “opt-in” by asking to be on the recommded-server list of Lemmy.world (or whoever)
Getting on the front page of Google is hard and Lemmy.world has done it. Instead of that achievement working against us (and having to manually tell/confuse people saying “please don’t just sign up for lemmy.world”) why not leverage that achievement to create a maximally-distrubted system. Cause we can eat our good-user-experience cake (Google “Lemmy”, click on the first link, put in sign up information) and still have our dont-put-everyone-on-one-server cake too.
this is a great idea. If you want DM and I’ll see about writing the standard and making the PRs for both the backend and official frontend
Thoughts?
I haven’t tested with 0.18.3 to see if new features were added to front-end lemmy-ui, but based on my experience with earlier 0.18 releases… the “Sign Up” page of Lemmy needs to have a custom message added for each instance basically introducing the instance from the admins. The experience is pretty bad… on my instance I have registration closed and lemmy-ui still just presents “Sign Up” links and even the form. I think it’s pretty important to get this in the back-end now so that the evolving independent front-ends all support the custom message shown above/below the Sign Up form…
Seems like something that shouldn’t take a lot of coding to get added (admin screen has place to create custom messages like “Legal”) that would be a good lemmy network-wide focus on the newcomer experience.