Fediverse

I think everyone agrees that the fediverse experience is highly different from the centralized experience, but I disagree that the fediverse must necessarily hide what it is and reproduce such a centralized system.

We've been fed the lie that tech is "easy" when it isn't at all, but that is not a problem. Driving a 2 tons box around at hundreds of km/h takes some skill, some time to learn, but we don't consider it too hard and skippable. I think we should put our efforts into simplifying the explanations, showing what it brings and what you lose, if we want more people to join (and I do)

That’s why I when I recommend the threadiverse (aka. lemmy or piefed or Mbin) to people I just send a link to an instance I think they’ll like. Instead of explaining the whole thing. If they join the instance with time federation will start to make sense to them and they might migrate later on.

I'm pretty techie and I've been here for months. I still don't fully understand why it matters and how a different instance would have changed my experience. The fediverse is so fragmented, it would be dumb to stick to one instance. My app is always set to browse "all". Everyone commenting seems to be from different instances. I'm certainly not going to start reading about different instances at signup when it presents the fact that you will be able to access all instances anyway. I picked randomly from one of the most popular choices. This whole process of a selection of an instance sounded good to software engineers, and sure this is how the technology fits together.....but these are "back end" issues that I (and other normies) don't care about at all. Users do not want to get into the weeds of how the back end works and it is certainly off putting.

"Lemmy has 47k monthly active users

• https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
• https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
• https://vger.app/settings/install if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions"

• [email protected] / https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37336391 for the reasoning behind this comment

Edit: voyager link

lol not happening. Lemme just say it again: Lemmings are completely disconnected from reality. They can't fathom that some people can't or don't want to spend time figuring that out. They will argue for days that "it's not that hard" and people should just learn how to do it or stop being lazy or whatever before doing anything about it.

Edit: I hadn't even read the other comments in this thread before I typed this. There's someone literally saying they want to gatekeep the fediverse from people without tech knowledge.

This keeps coming back from time to time. imo we need an instance or method to sandbox newbies.

My old comment:

A custom feed that allows new members to see a variety of the best that Lemmy has to offer would be a good start. Then, when they are comfortable with the platform and its dynamics, they can customise it further, or swap the newbie feed for their own custom filter (which practically would come down to community subscriptions, I suppose?)

Now instead of making this comment very long, I’ll put in an video game anology to make it a bit more digestible:

What we need is a tutorial area that showcases all the different things that the Lemmy endgame has to offer. Creating memes, sharing news, the art of shitposting, being a lurker, actual discussions vs just scrolling to see the funnies: all these things are enjoyed by different types of people, and before they can reclass and enjoy the wild open world of Lemmy, it would be good for them to get comfortable with the controls and settings in a relative safe space.

If people can’t understand what federation is then just send them directly to .world or lemm.ee or another big instance. If they have common sense then send them to join-lemmy and let them pick an instance. If someone is unable or unwilling to learn a very basic concept then they probably are not going to be a very good neighbor to have on the fediverse.

I agree that the discoverability of communities needs improvement. I think that most instances should add starter pack like features with the most popular communities for people to choose to subscribe to when onboarding new users.

In my opinion, finding the right and active communities to subscribe to is the biggest onboarding hurdle, not picking an instance. If picking an instance is a hurdle, that person wasn’t willing to try another site in the first place

I think they should stick to the "email provider" analogy. Whole paragraph should be something like:

The only thing you need to start interacting with the Fediverse is an account with one of the many providers, just like with email! Providers are freely available across the globe: pick one that suits your location or interests best! You can start browsing the content of nearly the entire Fediverse from whatever provider you choose. Don't worry, you can always create an account with a different provider later.

You could add a sentence or two about where to find sensible defaults or link an article that explains the more subtle things.

I think the emphasis on instances (and not naming them the more familiar providers) hinders adoption.

It just isn't possible, and we should want to dumb down the introduction too much. The Fediverse is not a centralised medium, and to participate in it, its users should understand that, analogous to how you would instruct people before using motor vehicles. Some things are just essential and need to be taught. Not teaching the stuff doesn't make it disappear. If some people cannot get behind the idea, then either find novel, intuitive ways of conveying it, or just accept that they cannot be a part of the Fediverse.

Do we want 'mass adoption'? and if so, why? and what would that look like, if we had it? how would we know that we had got it, and what good would the getting do us?

I disagree that we should do that.

Internet became a shit show the second everyone got a smartphone and the barrier to entry evaporated.

Needing to put in some effort to participate is a good filter for low effort people and their low effort worldviews.

They should just add an automatic joining option based by location for the ~~Lazy ass~~ new users with the option to manually join any instances.

If what instance you chose truly didn't matter this wouldn't be as big of an issue. Unfortunately defederation causes a tangled mess of netsplits.

What if instances could be tagged with their focus?

Then during an app user creation they could click a few "topics" and narrow down the choices to a much shorter list including member counts?

You're welcome to improve the text. That said the site is in large part aimed at instance admins and technical people. For normal users it's better to link them directly to a specific instance.

Mass adoption did not end well for Earth.

I think this should be baked into client apps.

The popular email analogy works here too. When you are setting up a new phone, you get a default email client app that offers you to log in or sign up to the default email service. And usually user can choose to log in with their service if choice, for which they have to sign up in advance outside the client app.

Having a default Fediverse client on new phones is not happening anytime soon, but if someone's mother installs a client app from the store link sent to them by a family member, she can get similar default onboarding experience.

Default instance can be picked by geo location, or maybe the less used out of 3 most popular instances. Or even maybe an instance ran by the client app developers.