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.

  • golden_zealotEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    As a new user, I think someone with a lot of experience with federated social media platforms and Lemmy specifically should create something that can be passed around which makes it easy to understand for incoming users.

    An infographic or short video would probably help a lot.

    • CosmicSploogeDrizzleOPEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      While I agree, I almost feel the opposite, at least for initial signup. One they have an account though, sure! Check out my post edit.

      I currently recommend telling people:

      “Go to kbin.social and sign up with email, Google, or Apple.”

      I think that’s all the sale that’s required. Once someone has an account and is browsing, they are going to have questions like, “what the hell is beehaw? Lol.” I think at that point they will be more receptive to learning more.

      If you show people a ppt or video beforehand I think they’ll checkout mentally and won’t give it a try.

      • golden_zealotEnglish
        10·
        1 year ago

        I can respect that, but as a user who has just made an account, I am hesitant to clog the place up with a multitude of questions, particularly when I expect there are others like me who would be asking the same questions at the same time.

        I am receptive to learning more, but being new, I don’t know where to ask and there doesn’t appear to be a resource readily available I can go to in order to learn that.

        As a result I would think being proactive versus reactive might save everyone some time is all.

        Furthermore, most of the talk on reddit is to join via lemmy.ml at this point, so regardless of best practices, it should be expected this is going to be the entry point for most new people at this time.