I was invited to comment here by u/BlazeAlt on Reddit last week regarding ways to lower the barriers to joining the Fediverse for average users — so here I go.
I'm sure a lot of this has been discussed ad nauseam, but I do have some specific starting suggestions at the end.
With corporate, single-instance social media, there's one place you go sign up, and you're in. You can find things that interest you with a simple search, and you can find people you know either by their names (Facebook) or by a very simple handle ([at]nickname). And if you're trying to build up an online identity — say, for your new podcast — if you're handle is unique enough you can end each episode with "and you can find us at MyNewPodcast on all the socials!"
Federated social media requires you to choose an instance before you can even sign up. But...
[average user voice]
- What the hell's an "instance"?
- How do I choose one?
- Why do I have to choose one?
- What do their names mean?
- What does the instance I choose say about me? -Does choosing one over another have any effect on the experience I will have?
- How does someone on another instance find me?
- How do I find someone on another instance?
- How do I find topics on another instance? -Does my choice of instance affect my access to those topics?
- Are the rules different on each instance?
- Who sets the rules?
- Where do I find them?
- What if I want to change instances?
- Will anyone be able to find me?
- How will they know I'm still me?
[/end average user voice]
Federated social media also requires weirdly complicated handles. [average user voice]
- Why are there two @ signs?
- What does it mean if there's a "!" instead of a "@" at the beginning?
- What the hell are all these weird domain names?
- Why can't I be just [at]TheSameHandleIUsedOnTwitter?
- If I'm trying to create an online identity, what's to stop someone from using [at]MyHandle[at]SomeOtherInstance.url and posing as me?
- What's the Lemmy equivalent of a blue check?
- If there isn't one, how can anyone be sure someone on Lemmy saying they're me really is me? -I mean, other than starting my own instance with recognizable name — but then I have to learn how to host my own instance.
[/end average user voice]
To be clear: I'm not literally asking these questions. I'm just illustrating some of the hurdles to adoption I described above, and some of the ways in which federated social media is exponentially more complicated than corporate social media.
As for solutions, I don't have an all-encompassing proposal at the moment. But a good place to start would be to agree upon a single default instance for new users to sign up, so that instead of being faced with "first choose an instance," it would be...
Welcome to Lemmy.URL, where you can join Lemmy communities for any topic, all over the world! What do you want your username to be?
- [____________]
OK, do you want your username to use a common lemmy "instance," like...
- [ ] ____________ [at] lemmy.URL
- [ ] ____________ [at] lemm.ee
- [ ] ____________ [at] etc.
OR would you like more custom username connected to a particular Lemmy community, like...
- [ ] ____________ [at] sci-fi-fans.url
- [ ] ____________[at] knittingnuts.url
- [find Lemmy instances where your username is available]
- [I know which Lemmy instance I want to join first]
Choosing a community-based username doesn't affect how you use Lemmy — no matter what community you chose, you'll have access to all the same content, communities, users, and feeds.
The [find Lemmy instances] button would lead to a page where you check off various areas of interest to then get a curated subset of relevant instances with a reasonable amount of information about them to help new users select one.
The [I know which instance] button would have you fill in the name of the instance, check if your username is available, then take you to that sign-up page.
So...something akin to join-lemmy.org, but with a flow closers to what I've described above, with very few, easy, "common" default choices, and a little more help through the process of choosing a specialized instance (if you want one).
This onboarding suggestion doesn't solve most of the problems/questions in my bullet lists (ideas still forming), but it would help prevent what happened to me the first few times I looked into Lemmy, which was that as soon as I saw I had to choose an instance before I did anything else — with pretty much zero information on what that meant or how it would affect my use of Lemmy — I said, "I don't have the time for this."
BTW, as I write this, my first Lemmy post, I will also add that the comment fields need to be WYSIWYG for if Lemmy ever hopes to be populated by refugees from Reddit, etc. Creating the quote section above was a huge pain in the ass, that required multiple rounds of [Preview] [Edit] [Preview] [Edit] [Preview] [Edit] [Preview] [Edit].
Food for thought. Cheers.
Very much agree with this. Multiple onboarding instances that all work basically the same way, routing new users to them based on geography and language to start, and maybe when the sign-up in complete, the first post they see is an automated very basic primer that includes something about that Lemmy isn't owned by anyone, let alone by a giant corporation that wants to collect and sell their identity.