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.

  • alienBluesEnglish
    23·
    2 years ago

    I’m a new user, so my opinion counts as such. My first concern upon signing up was understanding which communities I was allowed to see from which instance. Maybe a page where people can search by communities first and then show them where they are hosted/federated could solve this issue. Also, improving federations between servers could ease the signup process too. If any server allows communities from most other servers to be viewed, choosing what instance to join will be more a matter of personal beliefs and tastes than else.

    I’m afraid that setting a default instance could cause it to experience explosive growth and monopolization of the communities. As someone pointed out in a comment in another post, while users on Lemmy are growing, donations are not, so the bill for a single instance with all the people on it will probably be huge. Also, if all the largest communities are going to be on a single instance, how difficult will be to create new original ones to bring some people to the small servers?

    Captchas are bad for privacy. They allow the provider to track users between websites, and they are also bad for people because they are generally hard to solve for people with impairments. Also, automated solutions to bypass captchas exist on the market.

    Also, I believe a network with high-quality content is better than a bigger generalist one. A little barrier of entry and manual screening of people may serve well for this purpose, so I’m favorable to keeping it.

    • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      At the moment, the only tool I know is available for that is https://browse.feddit.de. It should be officially endorsed by the project and available on join-lemmy.org, imo. It crawls the network and allows you to search for communities and see where they are hosted!

      As for CAPTCHAs, Lemmy does not use any third-party provider, but rather a little library that generates them given a set of noise functions to apply. I’m not entirely sure how effective the top difficulty ones are at stopping OCR bots and the likes, but they seem pretty good.

      • DessalinesAEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        I can verify that although the capthas here in lemmy are privacy safe, they unfortunately do not prevent bots. The only thing that has proven to eliminate them, is registration applications.

        • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          mmm alright, anti-CAPTCHA bots have indeed been getting way better. Could there be some other library of some sort that yields better images?

          • DessalinesAEnglish
            4·
            2 years ago

            IMO its not worth the effort. Bots have beaten captcha, and registration applications, or email verifications, are a better way to handle spam registrations.

    • vxnxnt@feddit.deEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      Well said. This is pretty much what it comes down to imo. A decentralized platform should avoid all centralization at any cost. Monopolization just hurts other instances and communities while severely limiting diversity.

    • kosmo@satl.inkEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      Another problem with “everyone just joins lemmy.ml” is that eventually it becomes the weakest link, and other instances will either accept the hordes for the volume/content, or be forced to isolate. It’s much better if we hide the cost of decentralization from users but also keep the decentralization as much as possible. It’s not an easy problem, but it’s worth solving.

    • Jon@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Great points. A signup that focuses on communities seems like a great idea, a lot of people will be looking for alternatives to their favorite subreddits. And 💯 on the accessibility problems with captchas.

      Also, Mastodon’s switch to making mastodon.social a default signup is leading to more centralization (signups have decreased significantly on other intances) and hasn’t led to overall increased usage (total accounts and monthly active users are both relatively flat). So I’d be leery of using it as a model.

    • makingStuffForFunEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      My exact thoughts when signing up. So I simply picked the biggest and joined and here I am. I was hoping for an art / creative focused community. I would host my own instance but I’d need a way for images to be hosted on imgur, etc.