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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Your mother would ask you what the hell an “instance” was and then think that picking one meant she couldn’t look at posts from any others.
They should just add an automatic joining option based by location for the
Lazy assnew users with the option to manually join any instances.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.
It’s the same with linux distros. One of the instances could get a critical mass of newbies but we will still have die-hards trying to gatekeep the entire fediverse.
Oh, I’m sure the Venn diagram between Lemmings and Linux users is a circle.
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.
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
That’s why I when I recommend lemmy 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.
This.
There are rough edges to the actual onboarding experience, of course, but the joinlemmy and joinmastodon and joinwahtever websites really aren’t a part of it. They’re more of an ad for admins, demonstrating that there’s an active network of sites already using the product. The fact that not even the product develoeprs seem to understand this is a real issue, though.
Honestly, we need to stop sending people to “Lemmy” or “Mastodon” or whatever. Those are website engines. It’s like sending someone to “WordPress” when you want them to read your blog.
I look at it this way. If my grandma asks me how to “the email”, I’m not going to explain to her how she could choose outlook or gmail or whatever. I’m just going to choose and send the one I think is easiest for her to set up.
Decentralization is an essential element of the Fediverse.
I don’t get how you would get around choosing a server. Maybe make the recommendation algorithm easier? Like, ask clearer questions, ask fewer questions?
I think there could at least be some kind of button or check box that says, “I don’t need to know how the Fediverse works, just sign me up!” and it would randomly choose one of the big instances.
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)
We just need good defaults.
Sure driving a 2 ton box around takes skill, but we should still make it as easy and smooth ride as possible. Add Power Steering, Climate Control, ABS, Navigation, a Radio etc.
We shouldn’t give people a shitbox and expect them to enjoy driving it, especially when they’re used to better.
If we don’t fix our bad UX, we’re going to filter out all non tech savvy people, and create a bubble.
Default way to access the platform for the average potential news joiners is mobile
Voyager, Thunder, Artic provide good defaults.
Eeww, apps.
What is wrong with apps? I get a lot of great features from the one I use that I don’t get with the web client.
- multi-communities
- user tagging
- drafts
- keyword blocking
- themes
- customizeable ui
- etc
Most of them space things out in ways I don’t like and I hate gestures because I do things accidentally all the time. I can keyword block througb ublock origjn, although I do understand it is easier in most apps.
User tagging is the only feature I feel like I’m missing on default mobile lemmy.
I have also hit app fatigue. Just fucking sick to death of having a massive number of separate things that could be done through the browser.
Fair enough reasons. If you’re doing custom ublock filters and such, you’re likely able to tweak a lot to how you want it without any outside help from an app.
I see in you rother comment to someone you haven’t tried Voyager in a year. I haven’t tried that one recently, but I will say even over the last 6-8 months, so many of these apps have really matured from where they were a year or so ago. Very significantly so IMO. I think Summit is really the sleeper champ of the apps for my use case, and the dev is super helpful and responsive.
To each their own though. I love we have such great variety in UI here. At this point, there should be a couple viable options for near anyone.
Yeah, I loved rif as the mobile app for reddit because reddit’s mobile site has always been trash and the rif experience was so much better. I’m glad there are options for those who want them, and the desire for user tagging might lead me to trying something out eventually.
voyager is available as a web app if you’d rather use your browser vger.app
Tried it a year ago and didn’t like it.
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.
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.
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
This account is new, but I trust it.
Thanks ! I’m active on the fediverse under other accounts, but I wanted to try the piefed experience as The Devs intended
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?
eh.
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.
Your instance is defederated from four other instances, so yeah it has an influence.
Where/how do I check or know what impact that has? I think this just further strengthens the point that Lemmy is not welcoming to normal users at all and is just for specialist nerds.
But there’s this website that also tells you if other instances are defederated from yours: defed.xyz
I’d also like to know
Different instances that have a unique interest or theme will determine the type and feel of content in your local feed, and can have a tangible community as you recognize names from your instance. That’s the main difference.
unique interest or theme will determine the type and feel of content in your local feed
Then selection of interests and themes should be included in the onboarding process, instead of the mumbo-jumbo about choosing instances.
The onboarding process should be happening after this point. People shouldn’t be going “I want to join Lemmy!”, because that’s kind of a non-sensical statement. Lemmy is a website engine. They should be going “I want to join awesomewebsite.com. Oh, and look, I can see stuff from anotheraweseomewebsite.net, too! That’s so cool!”
If the website itself cannot provide a compelling reason as to why someone should sign up for it, then why should they sign up for it? So that it can be a dumb-terminal for some other website?
This isn’t always the case though. That’s just one example of difference between instances.
Instances can change everything, from being able to view nsfw content, if you can downvote or not, and who you can talk to (big difference between instances federated with ML/grad/hexbear and not. (And then the BeeHaw Defeds make a difference too).
Unique interests can be already be self-curated by subscribing to certain communities. All apps have the subscribed feed. There’s no need for communities of a certain type to be on one instance.
Edit: typo
There’s no need for communities of a certain type to be on one instance.
It’s nice to have country or language-communities in the local feed of one instance. Feddit.org or jlai.lu are good examples.
But it’s better from many angles that they are. Discoverability alone. Consistency of instance level rules. Theme.
It just makes sense on some level that sports communities would be on a sports-focused website, and such a website is where people whose primary interest is in discussing sports would have their accounts. From there, they can follow other topics they’re interested in, but their primary focus is still on, I don’t know, basketball or whatever.
Same for cars. Some of the most active forums on the internet are car ownership forums. If you could access CivicForums from IoniqForums, then it would make sense to do so. Much more sense than finding people discussing Hondas on lemmy.world and Hyundais on sh.itjust.works.
Just because you don’t give a shit where these discussions are taking place, doesn’t mean it makes sense for people to just shit them out anywhere.
Makes sense once there’s enough of a userbase…but currently there isn’t a huge amount of content of interest on Lemmy and sticking to a local instance just limits this even more. Currently I have to stick to “all” as even areas of subscription can run out of content with a quick scroll session.
This could be solved with a:
Can’t make up your mind?
Click here to choose a random general topic instance. Don’t worry, if you want to switch later you can.
They can’t really switch later, though. At least, all of their submissions and comments stay at the old account
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.
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.
Never considered it like that, good analogy
The difference is that the email provider you chose won’t make it so you can’t send an email to your friends because your providers don’t talk to one another.
Well, it’s meant as an introductory paragraph. I think such a general paragraph should not go to those lengths since the vast majority won’t be facing that issue. Most large instances that you would recommend for first timers are federated well enough that at least the civilised part of Lemmy is very accessible. I think that with:
- sensible defaults/suggestions
- easy to understand intro
- a help/link to a detailed article
you cover enough for users who can’t be bothered, who want to be informed, and those who want to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.
"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"
No, that’s not true. The big email providers absolutely block smaller and personal hosts. There’s a whole system of features and options you need to install and support in order to get through the door, thanks to spammers.
That’s a great analogy, but it’s too big a barrier for many, most give up before picking a instance, we should set good defaults and then the users can figure it out once they are used to the platform.
Yes, very much in favor of sensible defaults for first timers. Most frontends/apps support multiple accounts anyway so changing/adding more later on really shouldn’t be a problem
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.
