A new onboarding experience on Mastodon
blog.joinmastodon.org
Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge.

I’ve seen lots of discussion on reddit of users trying to get others to join Lemmy and the prevailing reply is that it is too difficult to navigate and comprehend. Having to answer multiple questions and wait for manual verification is combersome and is limiting growth at a time when nothing should be standing in Lemmy’s way. Combine this with server/instance selection analysis paralysis, and you get my point.

The linked mastodon blog post sums up my thoughts, but the TLDR is essentially this:

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don’t let dreams of decentralization interfere with the greater goal of achieving the network effect.

We should all be telling people to go to lemmy.ml and sign up. The devs should be too, and they should rethink/remove the questions and waiting period. Hell, just put a captcha. Discussions about servers and analogies to email as an example of federated service we all already use is a waste of breath. We shouldn’t have barriers to entry.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I’ve just found kbin.social and find it has superior signup options. It’s just: make an account (email/password), or sign up with Google or Apple. No server talk. Upside is the layout is nice and it acts as a Lemmy instance (threads) as well as a mastodon instance (microblogging). Only downside currently is that their android/iOS app is in development and isn’t ready yet, so desktop only.

https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin

https://kbin.social/

I think this might be the better recommendation for newbies at the moment.

  • RoaringSilence@feddit.deEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Good point and we should spread the word as suggested.

    There are still some hurdles that will lead to problems when mass migrations happen. Not from a technical point, as I understood the servers don’t have any problem handle a lot of people, but from the community aspect.

    • FOMO, is always a considerable point when joining a instance. It must be clear that the instance is just the entry point into the fediverse and there is still access to the complete content.

    • fragmentation, while this is the whole point of the fediverse it could lead to missed chances when the critical mass for a sub is not reached as the community is spread over 10 gaming subs on different instances. A more easy process for subscription to interest groups that subscribe to all of the mentioned 10 gaming subs collected under language preferences. To solve this the apps used could support these features without the need to perform changes on the server side.

    • a standard set of communities should be there for available on every instance. But then moderation will be a problem as there is not one mod but 10 needed for the gaming example.

    I think there is still a long way to go. While I am happy with what’s there for now, bringing the people together under a fragmented structure will be the biggest challenge.

    Maybe the kbin way will help as it collects the fediverse under one interface, no matter if lemmy, mastodon or whatsoever. The only problem is the account multiplication to join everything.

    • gnoop@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’d like to see singular communities rather than community-per-server in the federation. If /c/NHL exists, it simply exists. Right now, each server has their own communities that other servers can also join in but you always know they’re separated.

      • ඞmir@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Yes, this. We need a way to link communities on different servers together. I want a unified feed with tech discussion from beehaw and from lemmy.ml, but right now these are two separate feeds. I also want to sub to “tech on every federated instance” but I can’t tell lemmy.ml that “hey, I want all tech news you know about”. I have to manually scrape communities and sub to all of them. And that doesn’t even help if new ones are created every day.

      • RoaringSilence@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Basically I like that too, but a decentralized structure brings it up different in the first place.

        The decentralized server, community structure has to come to a centralized information structure somehow. With the flexibility to determine on the user side what sources you want to collect in your “meta” NHL collection.

        • gnoop@lemmy.mlEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          Right now one of the problems is that, at least on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, the default view for the front page as well as the community list is Local. You have to switch to All to see everything. The main Lemmy page touts the federation but it’s less prominent once you’re actually looking at content.

          I’d like to treat it like usenet. rec.roller-coasters is the same across usenet servers. Right now, each server might have its own. I can access all of them all, sure, but it feels fractured and splintered with, potentially, most users simply accessing their servers local community.