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?
We need a one-line explanation (I cannot find words to distill this), demonstrating that instance selection is entirely arbitrary - users need to not only believe it, but understand it intuitively, and quickly. And it’s not intuitive to most persons’ Web experience (With every internet decision I have made since IRC, the domain at which I hoist my flag, has defined the content available to me. Why would I register with an instance that hosts only thirty users? Don’t I want to be where the other people are? Hang on, if the choice is arbitrary, why am I presented with a choice at all? Surely I’m missing something. No, I don’t understand this, and so just in case, I should put myself where the other people are. If it wasn’t better over there, they wouldn’t all be there. Hang on, how do I hop between instances seamlessly? Why are there instances? What even is an instance? Why am I here? Who am I?)
Just address those concerns in ten words or less, and problem solved! XD (I may or may not have had the same questions)
Instances are like the different houses of Hogwarts; No matter what house you’re in, you’re still a wizard (Harry).
But I’m not a wizard, I’m just Harry!
We may have struck gold here.
It’s a difficult challenge.
The common refrain about the fediverse is “don’t over think it! You can engage with communities across instances!”
But the truth is the instance you choose does matter to the experience you’ll have. The most obvious thing to consider is what other instances is it federated with and what is it’s reputation? Who you are able to engage with on the fediverse is directly related to your instance.
Second, one of the primary feeds you’ll see is the “local” posts. It’s the default as far as I can tell. For non technical users, that will be the default experience.
So choosing an instance is, for me, a question of what you do and don’t want to see, fundamentally.
The catch-22 is that for those who aren’t power users, you really want to have them onboard to an active instance, which implies a minimum size. But that then makes it more difficult to bootstrap a new instance.
Finally, it would be interesting to have a Split View of what “all” looks like on the instance you choose, and what “all” looks like on the instances it is de federated from.
I think the biggest thing that will help users is to have some sorta way that log ins are persistent across different instances
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.
