It used to be a banner above the comments. Now it seems to be in the sidebar. That's a good design choice. It's an improvement. It might not have scared my friend so much.

Here's the screenshot he sent me a couple of weeks ago. I've thrown it onto some image pastebin called "pasteboard".

These days, apparently (I followed the link to your comment, https://feddit.de/comment/2020091), it's on the sidebar and says:

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !asklemmy@lemmy.ml

This is actually a massive improvement. It gives directions, and the earlier one didn't. It's friendlier than the earlier version too.

However, this evolution badly needs to continue (since I don't see how asklemmy's front page is going to tell you anything about the federated instance signup process or enough about the "home instance" concept for them to know they need to go to their home instance.) If I was given a link to your comment, and I wanted to upvote your comment, I would still need to 1) navigate to my home instance's search tool and 2) paste your comment's URL into that search tool. And that's still a complicated process for a lot of people.

I do really appreciate the direction the web app is going here,

• they have gotten rid of the "vote" buttons and the "reply" buttons if you're not logged in.
• the "not logged in" notification now tutorializes a little bit.

These are all very good developments.

But they need to continue. We need to tutorialize stronger.