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.
I’m not sure I’d like that. I kind of like there being a technological filter. It prevents the Fediverse from turning into Facebook or X. The public Internet has been around and part of society for 40 years now. If you still don’t get it in 2025, that ain’t everyone else’s fault. People using the Internet in the 90s had to deal with way more than just figuring out what an “instance” is.
Unrelated but there’s a word we Mexicans use that you should look up. It’s “mamador”. No particular reason.