On join-lemmy.org, the project is described as “A forum and link aggregator for the Fediverse”. In the previous post, multiple people mentioned that this is not a good description. However I have a hard time coming up with anything better.
So please post your suggestions below, and upvote the ones which are both accurate and easy to understand for new users. Later I pick one of the most upvoted options for the website.
By the way the second title “Follow communities Anywhere in the world” will likely go away (see the pull request for frontpage redesign). After this is decided I may also make another post to get suggestions for the longer description text below (“Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. …”).
Edit: Please only post concrete suggestions in top-level comments, and use replies to discuss. And here you can see how a few other Fediverse projects do it:
I think the main problem is “link aggregator” which doesn’t make a lot of sense as the main function is discussion. For a minimal change you could go for “a discussion platform for the fediverse”.
If “fediverse” is too obscure; you could try just “a decentralised discussion platform”. Decentralised isn’t technical, you can’t fully describe the fediverse in a sentence but “decentralised” gives a clue.
“Decentralized” may not be technical, but still its a long and complex word. “Fediverse” seems friendlier to me.
I’d argue most people would know what centralised and decentralised mean, at least in abstract terms, while anyone that hasn’t encountered it before would have no idea what the fediverse is.
When I first heard “fediverse” I thought it was a joke about everyone on mastodon being a fed 😆
I get your point, but I agree with RobotToaster. We’re still at a point where the Fediverse is a very niche thing and a very niche term. For most regular people “Fediverse” is a nonsense word that tells them absolutely nothing, while “decentralised” (albeit a technical term) is at least a concept most people can grasp.
But if you tell them fediverse they can look it up and see there are tons of other sites that are part of the same group. If you say decentralized it sounds like you’ll be alone and separate
But how many will actually do that, though? That doesn’t really sound like how regular people would react. Like, if regular people were capable of reading up and looking into things on their own accord as part of the sign-up process we wouldn’t need to have this conversation about a snappy and succinct summary sentence about Lemmy in the first place.
Yeah I guess mastodon has it as ‘decentralized social media’ so it would be more in tune with that
I think the word “open instance” could be used in place of decentralized. So when we frame it as open discussion instance, it is a reference to how the instance is open.