I’ve seen from a lot of people that the biggest gripe with getting started is trying to figure out which instance to sign up with. I’d like to try and make that much less of an issue with a simple user-onboarding process.
What I’m thinking is presenting a user with a normal sign up screen, like you would see elsewhere, but with a dropdown that allows the user to select an instance from a list of options. Optionally, an “advanced” user could supply their own instance. The default list of instances would preferably be decent sized, trusted instances, but would also hopefully get users to stop trying to register on one of a small handful of instances and causing poor performance for those instances.
What ideas do you have?
The fediverse onboarding is at odds with the idea of what it means to have an account with a specific instance. Even I don’t know how important it is that my account originates on lemmy.ml. But one thing is clear after using it for a while, is that it does not matter where you come from when trying to browse content.
But how am I supposed to know I “vibe” with the direction of an instance when the first thing I have to do is register with any of them.
When I first started with Jerboa, it also presented me a list of predefined instances. Might it be helpful to maybe show an icon and a short description about the instance when I select it?
Also, maybe some (i) somewhere along the way that you have to click that explains how this is all held together?
This is a good idea. Maybe something like the Join Lemmy page where it lists recommended servers and a short description?
I also definitely think an explanation of how things work at the beginning is great too. AFAIK, Mastodon tries to do this in their onboarding, but it’s a bit confusing to read. Something like that, but must better explained would probably be great. Once we (hopefully soon!) get importing/exporting of data, it can be explained that it doesn’t particularly matter which instance you sign up with since you can move whenever you wish.