Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Onboarding experience needs to be simpler for mass adoption (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can't be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don't know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won't work.

My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: "Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net/. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances."

For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Honestly to a certain extent I think being decentralized is somewhat beneficial. Perhaps it's just the fact I've been visiting forums for like 20 years and feeling jaded, but I never liked that any knuckle dragger could easily make an account and act like an ass.

It's not a very high bar to clear to figure out how to sign up for lemmy, so if you can't even figure that out, maybe it's for the best to help prevent polluting the user pool. If you're gonna be an ass, you should at least have to work for it.

[–] Kichae 8 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren't intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can't really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.

The fact that "Lemmy" isn't a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you "saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning" and it be a meaningful statement. You can't substitute "Lemmy" into that sentence, though, because there isn't a Lemmy.

There's a thousand Lemmys.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Spot on. Focusing on the software is the most tech-centered approach one can do, unfortunately tech people suck at make something excellent for non-tech people.

People don't like it but we need to put more focus on the fediverse as a network, say the AP word exactly once as to not confuse, but always operate in that state of mind.

And tech people must build a web extension to do fediverse stuff while being somewhere on the web ! That's what a User Agent is for, doing stuff for me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Can you expand that last line? I don't understand clearly what you mean.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Browsers are not supposed to be only "html document viewers". In spec parlance, they are supposed to be agents for doing whatever the user wants to do: that's why they also offer facilities for passwords, for example.

The fediverse is a bunch of web servers each with the accounts on it. When I am subscribed on instance A and go on an account on instance B, today the browser acts as a document viewer: I can see what the profile wants to show me, hopefully it has a button that properly redirects me but then I leave the context of the message I was looking at.

What I want instead is for the browser itself to offer me fediverse actions: like, comment, reply, directly from where the content I'm interacting with is. I don't expect browsers to do that soon so the next best thing is web extensions