There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites.
Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.
Lemmy suffers from the same discoverability issue… so we aren’t exactly the best place to tell others about obscure websites. From the start we’ve inherited an open-source community that leans liberal, and aside one very large recent shift that means that the community also leans mostly Democrat.
What does that have to do with discoverability? Well, one look at a front page can clue you in. (gosh I hope these screenshots shrink in size for display)
IT, Politics, and Star Trek all over the front page of my instance. Possibly worse on others. Imagine if your 80 year old great-grandma landed on this page. All she knows is what Fox News says. Instant close on the website. Not even going to open one discussion. But let’s say she did open the one about the FBI director being missing:
oh my
Now let’s see a competing website:
Oh, new Chinese food place! Remote work isn’t working? Carrying your dog to pick up food? that’s silly! 2.7 million of wine! She must have really hated that job!
So what is my point? How can Lemmy increase it’s discoverability? I feel like community diversity would be the #1 concern. Well… one obvious action is to sanitize the front page of the popular instances. I’m going to assume that’s a highly unpopular opinion, because then it wouldn’t be Lemmy anymore. Maybe perhaps there is a different frontpage for logged out and logged in users? With politics being an opt-in for active sessions? Or maybe we should just post more cute cats.
What do you guys think? Am I completely wrong about community diversity? What changes would you make to Lemmy? It’s not an easy answer.
Vast, vast majority of sites that exist are small. And significant portion, if not most of them are going to be actually not that interesting or outright junk. Who’s going to decide which are good enough to show up on the list? And how are you going to maintain them over time—if you succeed in making a small site discoverable, now what, is it going to be on the list forever? If not, on what kind of criteria you’re going to maintain it, and how are you going to measure it?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying people should built these lists, they absolutely should. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution and creating something that resembles one-size-fits-all is going back to the twisted, weird system that so many of Lemmy users (including me) are happy to be away from.
I see no problems with the screenshot you posted. Of course that “KIA” comment is extremely insensitive at best, but we all know that any sort of open Internet community has this problem.
If you find Reddit more interesting, then you have already solved the problem for you: just go discover things there. If you find your Lemmy homepage boring, maybe sub to different communities and set up your page to show subscribed only (that particular setting helped me a lot).
If you want to create some sort of smart automated strategies that get you to have the the cake and eat it too (eg. remain subscribed to all of those communities but filter posts for based on some sort of diversity criteria eg. “no star trek more than once a month”) then please go ahead and experiment: the content is freely available using computer-readable formats, you can learn to code or hire someone… I bet someone is already doing something like that. You don’t need to solve the problem on higher level, and doing so is going to do more harm than good.
But as you say, it’s not an easy problem but I think it shouldn’t be. No individual should be able to impose restrictions like that globally. We are each responsible for our own diet. (And for lemmy.world thank mods for keeping out the shit sprayers.)
I love the fact that federation means we could have a grandma-focused instance that applies all my hypothetical filters by default. It’s possible… but there is currently no desire to become the front page of the internet. We’re a niche, and that just means we aren’t the place to try to advertise for the little guy.
wanting to advertise for the little guy in general is kind of pointless, it feels good until you realize that in a healthy ecosystem there are just always going to be more little guys–the middle guys are selected from larger pool and the big ones are selected from larger pool of the middle guys … it’s the evolution. and evolution is all about niches and being good enough.
the kind of link lists linked in the OP are actually awesome, but they are best served in larger number and in context. especially, if eg. i see someone make an insightful post or article and turns out the same person has a list of links, then it’s usually a treasure trove of more posts, articles, insights and even projects and communities. and yes, if i gave the link list to my mom it would be completely counter-productive, regardless of whether someone is a “little guy” or not. the littleness is not the point, the relevancy is.
and sure you could make link lists that are assorted ranging topics with the main criterion “the author found it interesting and want to share it and/or come back later to it”, and while some of that cake is eaten by micro-blogging sites like mastodon or bluesky (esp. the sharing and quick discussion). outright simple, structured lists also have own kind of charm.