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.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I think they need an easy wizard, some way to guide users to an instance they could use to sign in. Ask a couple questions and then bam here you are. The biggest issue then is "Well you don’t go here to sign in now you use this url. " lemmy could add some sort of redirect though for known people?

    • MackieEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      A wiki for new users would be super helpful. It took me a couple of tries to even get to the account creation stage from a baseline of “not knowing anything about federated content”

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        A quick video on the homepage, professionally done would be really useful too. One of those snappy 1min videos on how to sign up, and what federated means with lots of animations.

        There’s a reason those types of videos are everywhere, they work well