The website is already linking to google play store and apple store. right now apps that are purely web don’t have a platform to read reviews on . plus neodb lib.reviews are open source although they might not yet be ready for the task yet.

Besides Lemmy mainly gets promoted by word of mouth (eg people recommending it on Reddit)

I doubt that, any data? similarweb shows the top referring site for now is openalternative.co (although at least one of the referring sites mentioned doesn’t seem to make sense for me ).

If people want to review Lemmy communities, it would make more sense to make a Lemmy community for that purpose.

I think people would want to see average ratings. reading a community page means you only read 1-3 reviews and that sample size is too small and potentially biased. you could just run into people who hate a instance for some particular reason (and it’s not hard for me to think of reasons like that).

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

If its off by default that is a reasonable suggestion.

At this point, you have to wonder what the Lemmy dev team is focusing on.

See the 1.0 milestone for lemmy and lemmy-ui . you can see both what they intend to do and what they already did.

What i am worried about is that the federation system is already kinda hard to understand. New users who are not hardcore fediverse nerds (Like me and probably the rest of the people answering this post). Could start thinking “what the hell is going on?!” and might think lemmy is obtuse and drop it.

Lemmy could at some point benefit from a UX study where new users volunteer to be observed while the software is first use (software companies sometimes do that). maybe that could verify there are no problems . adding a searchable FAQ and a introductory tutorial (saying something "this will take about 5/10/15 minutes) could help.

Also lemmy has some kind of plugin system. this actually sound like something where a lot of people will want to experiment with different methods (maybe even benchmark them in some way). maybe open an issue asking for the ability to extend sorting with plugins?

Regarding mental health . avoidance is generally not considered a good thing. one of the criticism of why technology is bad for cognition is that it creates a very pleasant experience but solving problems and achieving meaningful outcomes in the real world requires delaying gratification and accepting negative experiences

Emotional regulation and resilience are skills. if you don’t get negative experiences you don’t get to practice those skills. this is why helicopter parenting where well meaning parents do too much for their kids end up creating psychological problems like lowered self esteem.

All those terms, “increasing shareholder value” , “no tracking”, “is billionaire proof” , “no venture capital available”. would be really hard to understand for anyone that is not a hardcore fosshead . even if they will understand understanding the benefits of these properties is not easy . reportedly the average age of a reddit user is 23, how many 23 year old know what “venture capital” and “shareholder” even mean?

Maybe lemmy needs something like a whitepaper or a manifesto.

I looked around for some info about A/B testing but it seems relatively complicated to setup. Do you have any tools to suggest for that?

Not really. i know wikimedia foundation did that but it is probably not the best option. googling gives a few results but that’s not really insightful.

And I can see what you mean about the text sounding unsure. What do you think about this one?

I don’t think this solves the problems i mentioned (including in the pull request). donations and working full time are a means to an end. the average response by average joe might be “well they can just get a regular job like the rest of us”.

I don’t we should insist on just having a elevator pitch. sure an elevator pitch is very useful but i know that when i wanted to donate to charities I looked for a decent chunk of information to help me make a decision.

this part that appears inside thunderbird (which seems to be doing very well interm of fundraising) is more like something i had in mind (in term of feeling important)

there is some research about this type of messaging (see risk aversion and fear appeals). naturally it does not feel great because i think the thought that a project is at risk and might need donations is a negative evaluation that will probably produce a negative emotion. but i think it is the honest truth for thunderbird and lemmy and any large scale open source project.

If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below.

Add “help design lemmy” next to the title? e.g.

Help Design Lemmy: How to improve the Joinlemmy Donation page?

As i said adding a “learn more” section would be really helpful. right now it sounds like you are not really sure you even want donations. if you won’t believe people should donate and are not willing to explain why people should do it why should potential donors believe it? . so far i didn’t really see a noticeable spike in the patreon and liberapay stats despite many of the largest servers using the newest version (you can enable it to show the version of servers). some projects have a fairly consistent increases in the number of donations for years (e.g. 1 2 3 ) and i don’t think lemmy has less potential. even piefed donations have been increasing organically.

Of course A/B testing will be the best way to prove these claims.

Maybe we could crowd source a list of arguments about why people should donate.

IANAL , but theoretically a judge could decide that part of the AGPL is “unreasonable” and a case could go to trail which could be expensive.

Also you are still running the lemmy.ml instance which could theoretically lead to a lawsuit. its why lemmy.world created the fedihosting foundation which reportedly functions as a limited liability company.

Also a cooperative (what you want to set up), where some of the profit in the form of a salary go to the “owners” which are the workers as far as i can tell can’t be a non profit

That is true, but not so easy to do. To make donation pages like those in your link would require setting up some kind of nonprofit and directly handling credit card payments with some payment processor

Shouldn’t it be a good idea anyway to set up a limited liability company at some point anyway? in case you will get sued.

Just add a timeout you have to wait before pressing, say 10-30 seconds.

There is a open issue , the developers talked about it but no one pulled the trigger on it, this can be implemented on the client in a way that is pretty good (you could create client side backups using something like dropbox). We could open more issues on the various lemmy clients and maybe even piefed which seems to prioritize feature development in a way that might be better then lemmy developers currently. you can already read the comments on piefed and then subscribe to the posts and incrementally read new comments.

Consider adding it to awesome lemmy which is linked to from the lemmy readme.

iirc yes, there was actually a link on every issue opened (see example), it was on bountysource which eventually died and iirc it was at a time where lemmy was not nearly as popular.

If you can’t develop it yourself, i suggest putting a bounty on algora or polar , and trying to crowdsource the money (e.g. by putting a link to the bounty on your profile with an explanation).

Some of them are paid , they get donation money , and also from the NLNET iirc (which is tax payer money iirc).

Anyway this isn’t how you handle feedback , there is a reason wikipedia has a guideline called assume good faith , because if you are not assuming good faith you are probably assuming bad faith and that makes it difficult for an organisation to function for obvious reasons.

Integrating with patreon or opencollective where one of the rewards is access to supporter only lemmy communities might be a good use case for a plugin system.

The project is missing developers, if you want to then implement them yourself , or fund raise the money using a bounty platform like polar, some of the ideas are fairly controversial and linus law of trail and error apply here, with that said i think lemmy could benefit from a add on system like those wordpress and discourse have and those ideas can be checked out.

Personally i had them accept some of my feedback before (e.g. i am the one who requested the ability to block an instance which got implemented despite one of the developers were against it and the other suggested i should switch instances).

Just try to be prudent and persuasive .