I had shared an earlier version of this last week, and a draft of the updates a few days ago. Thanks to everybody for the feedback!
Here’s the key points:
- Don’t tell people “it’s easy”
- Improve the “getting-started experience”
- Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
- Prioritize accessibility
- Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
- Invest in moderation tools
- Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
- Values matter
- This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity
Yeah honestly I’ve seen so many posts with multiple paragraphs explaining federation, while I’ve just been telling my friends two sentences like “it’s just like reddit but instead of one website there’s multiple independent ones (called instances) that all see each other’s content. All content on all those instances can and should only be accessed through the website you signed up on, and when you do that it works basically completely like reddit”
This leaves out a bunch of information of course, but if they want more, they can always be confused and ask or look it up themselves.
Yeah I mean even like…at this point you can show them a screenshot of the front page of kbin/lemmy and say “hey, it looks like this. Sign up for this instance & you’ll be fine. Here’s a link to 10 magazines you should subscribe to, and here’s a link to your preferences.”
“Fediverse: an open source Reddit-like cluster. An instance is a node.” … heh, as I read that, it probably makes things more confusing.