When I first signed up here, or tried to sign up here, join-lemmy just didn't want to load anything. So I ended up going to bed and trying again the next morning. The next morning, it finally loaded the list of instances and going by the experience I had just had with the website battling to even load anything, I chose an instance advertised as "join here to reduce load on larger instances". And this instance just didn't want to load anything properly. Half of the images in posts just weren't showing up. And when I searched LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, only dead communities showed up and I'm pretty sure nothing from Blรฅhaj.
Then I went to world and still found it to be a ghost town. Eventually I realised that it was because 'English' wasn't selected in my language settings. Because I didn't realise that you have to ctrl click to select both 'undefined' and 'English'. I've used software where you have to ctrl click but I'm not sure I've ever come across another website where this is the case. And on this note, the whole fact that 'undefined' even exists as an option comes across as bush league and makes it look like a beta version.
Then there's another issue here. The god damn internal politics. So someone signs up on the insurance that says "focused on programming and development", then have everyone calling them a tankie or be cut off from multiple instances that have de-federated. It's clear to me now that 'ml' stands for "Marxist Leninist" but when you're new here and just looking at descriptions in join-lemmy, it just looks like a unique url like all the others.
Personally I think there's a lot of reasons that people would give up trying to get started here. That's before even trying to break them ice with a silly question in AskLemmy and getting snarky snark and smart asses in the replies. And I use that as an example because in my first week here, I saw someone post an innocent question in AskLemmy, get hostility as a response, then leave.
