How can we make the fediverse easier to adopt? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by thebestlettuce to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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or another way to ask it, what made fedi easier for you to adopt? I don't think the answer is better ways of explaining how federation exactly works, because no matter how good of an analogy you can make, most users don't care and just want to know how to get started

EDIT: I guess I'll go first, for something like Mastodon I think encouraging people to use a client like pinafore.social or Tusky instead of going directly to the website of the instance would help stop people from confusing themselves by getting redirected between instances. Same for Lemmy as better clients start to pop up

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[-] Kempeth@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago

What bothered me the most:

I couldn't find the lemmy site without adding "join" to the search. On the third page there's finally a link - to github - which non-techies are immediately going to navigate away from. The remaining 6 pages had no more links to anything related to this lemmy.
Once you ARE on the right page the majority of it is about getting you to host your own instance. This is where you're losing the next 90%. This content needs to be 99% dedicated to onboarding.
If you're STILL in the pipeline your next hurdle is picking a site to join with no clue what this decision means for you. A whole bunch are gonna give up right there. There needs to be a curated short list of critical mass instances where noobs aren't greeted by crickets.
If you manage to actually register an account you're then left with wondering how you're gonna get any content.
- defaulting to "local" vs "subscribed" is technically sensible but very inconvenient for randos.
- the fact that you simply cannot subscribe to NSFW communities if you happened to register at a non-NSFW instance is very unintuitive
- there is very poor guidance to picking new communities even if you end up finding them in the search. raw subscribers is an insufficient metric considering how sparsely populated the space is. There should at least be another indicator for actual activity.

this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023

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