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.

  • Kierunkowy74@kbin.social
    211·
    2 years ago

    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.

    Actually, it is not a superior signup option*. /kbin simply has no other English-language server! (remaining three /kbin servers are Polish-speaking)

    *Well, corporate logins being available as an option actually are an advantage - for not-deGoogled users.

    • hybrid havoc@beehaw.org
      12·
      2 years ago

      This is the same trap people are falling into with regards to Bluesky. “It’s just easier” because no one else is running a server using that software yet.

    • necrophagist
      5·
      2 years ago

      I just tried signing up for kbin, can’t even login it just says “your account is not active” and i got no email verification or anything. Very janky…