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.

  • that_one_guyEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    I think the main problem here is that there isn’t a really accessible explanation of federation and how these social platforms differ from the other, larger options. There is lots of great documentation for interested users to acquaint themselves with, but it would be beneficial to have a more ‘elevator pitch’ version that can get people moving through the signup process with more confidence. Even just a short message saying: “hey, choosing your instance isn’t as important as it looks right now, you’ll be able to freely use any other instance once you sign up” could go a long way towards making on-boarding much smoother. Once a user is in the system, they can learn what details they care about through osmosis for the most part.

    I do think that having a default instance would help with streamlining the on-boarding process, but I don’t think that the idea aligns with the values of lemmy as a whole. It’s important to keep services decentralized in order to keep things free and open.

    • CatsrulesEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      I personally look at federation like email. Doesn’t matter if I am using a Hotmail email address. I can still talk to everyone over at gmail, icloud, yahoo, Comcast etc…

      email is the original federation service.

      • Kaldo@beehaw.orgEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        As a person new to federations, I have to admit that the mail analogy doesn’t really answer or clarify much. Who decides what gets to go into a federation? Should everyone be in a single federation since otherwise there is no communication? Do I need a separate account per federation? Whats the practical limit on number of instances per federation?

        I think first of all we need a really good FAQ.

        • WhipperSnapperEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          I think first of all we need a really good FAQ.

          I think you’re right. For example, I’m still unclear about communities across different servers. is /c/gaming showing me everyone’s posts to /c/gaming, or just those from my own server? If I search for a community, will I see the results even if there’s no instance of that community on my own server?

          I agree with everyone saying this is critical to the success of the platform. It shouldn’t take research to understand what you’re signing up for, at least if anyone wants to see success in picking up where reddit left off.

          • BarbarianEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            To answer the question, communities are server specific. There are 2 separate gaming communities on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org that I know of, and probably more by now.

            About needing better documentation, I could not agree more! It’s very understandable considering that just 3 days ago this was a place with 1k users at peak and 2 devs plugging away at improving the framework. This is an open source project, so be the change you want to see (not directed specifically at you, that’s for everyone). We can make this whatever we want, but people need to put in work. Been trying to answer as many questions as I can reasonably answer for a few hours now :)

            • WhipperSnapperEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              communities are server specific

              Thanks for the info. I was actually under the impression that the opposite was true. Wouldn’t that heavily incentivize joining an already popular server?

              • Obi@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                3·
                2 years ago

                You can still simply go sub to the large communities even if you’re not on that server though.

                I’m curious to see how that whole hierarchy pans out, how will servers organize, will it end with basically if you have a large community you have a dedicated server for it, but maybe people actually prefer to register with a server that they identify with more from a locality or mentality perspective, rather than topics?

                We can speculate but ultimately it’ll be a natural evolutive process. I know for myself I picked something that I felt would be general purpose and I suspect a lot of users would feel similarly.

              • BarbarianEnglish
                2·
                2 years ago

                No, because being on a different server does not impede you in the slightest from subbing, posting and commenting in the more popular one. Think of it as the difference between /r/gaming and /r/truegaming. Same subject, different communities.

                • WhipperSnapperEnglish
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  Oh I see, so even if the community is hosted on a different server, I can still search for and sub it. It just gets dicey if there are multiple instances of the same community on different servers. I guess then that’s something that needs to be mitigated too, and I’ve seen other folks in this thread talking about fragmentation. Again, thanks for the info.

                  I will say there’s a spark here that’s been missing from reddit for a long time. Similar to how reddit felt before the digg folks came over. I’m enjoying it!

                  • BarbarianEnglish
                    2·
                    2 years ago

                    Yeah man, I’m in the same boat on feeling excited for the possibilities here. I’m tired as shit after a hard weekend, and I’m still trying to answer as many basic questions that are within my knowledge as possible :))

                    On the confusion part, yeah, there will be some adjustment for everyone (thankfully I had a 3-day head start). Just like people know that support@gmail.com and support@totallygmailtrustmebro.com are 2 different servers, people are gonna need to learn to look at which server a community is on

        • zksmkEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I think you’re getting hung up on the word “federations” (noun) instead of the adjective “federated”.

          Who decides who gets to email who? The email provider admins. Should everyone be in a single email network/bubble since otherwise there is no communication? Mostly, yes. Do I need a separate account per email bubble? Per email bubble? Yes. But how many email bubbles are there? One? Whats the practical limit on number of providers per the email world? None, mostly?

          Gmail does ban a lot of small email providers if they don’t seem “legit” enough. And that is where you’re onto something with the noun federations.

          If a bunch of instances really disliked a different bunch of instances they can indeed severe each other from each other. The admins would do that. They put the other instances on a block list. Most Mastodon instances block Trump’s Lie ehm Truth Social etc. But otherwise you can talk from gmail to hotmail to mcselfhost, with one account.

          Basically federation works based on a block-list, not a allow-list, unless the admins of the instance set it that way, just like email providers.

        • BarbarianEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          Lemme try my best in order:

          1. The admins. The people who run the server the community is hosted on.
          2. Ideally, yes. But each instance gets to decide who they ban. If there’s an AngryNazi.fuckyou instance, each other instance can decide they don’t want to talk to them or see their communities. Don’t want your instance to get banned on another instance? Control your users.
          3. I guess? If your a user of AngryNazi.fuckyou and that instance gets banned in a lot of instances, you will need to make a new account in a less tainted instance.
          4. Unlimited (depending on hardware power Vs users, of course)
    • thegiddystitcher@beehaw.orgEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      A default instance would help people signup more easily, but afaik there’s currently no way to migrate to another instance right? So this approach already causes problems on Mastodon but it seems like it would be even worse over here due to people then being “trapped” on whatever the default is.