The email analogy is really… boring.
Full disclosure, this idea is for a Lemmy client I’ve been toying around with making. I’ve gotten a bit in my head and would to run an idea by everyone.
The challenge:
Onboard people onto Lemmy in a way that makes sense to people that understands Fediverse and explains it well enough that typical social media users will understand it too
My onboarding flow idea.
As you read this, think of CARROT weather, an app with a funny personality.
You are an alien creature exploring the Lemmy Verse, a federation of social planets. You must chose a home planet, then you are free to explore its local communities or any of the communities in the lemmy federation of planets
I might give the alien creature a name. TBD.
Is this stupid?
Remaining challenges:
- I suspect a guiding the user to select the same “home planet” if they log out could be an issue.
- Should I explain that not all planets live in the same Federation? I’m thinking no.
Would love to reinforce this with animations that really drive the idea home. Almost like cut scenes from a video game. But that is beyond my area of expertise, for now.
Short answer: Yes, this is stupid.
yea that makes no sense and should be considered insulting to the listener
I just say it’s basically reddit but it’s community built and run instead of owned by a big company. And then if they wanna know more about how it works, I can explain the concept of it being distributed and whatnot
I very much agree with just inviting people to join your instance. Don’t overcomplicate it.
I like it but I really think we spend too much time explaining the home instance. We should put a lot less emphasis on it because it’s stressful to people. Just invite them to join your home instance and they can change in the future if they want.
Very much agree with this, I think people really overcomplicate it.
“It’s like reddit, but community build and community run.”
And they you can just invite them to your instance
Remember this is an onboarding flow for an app. It has to capture the user and explain things well without losing their attention.
What I want to avoid is “hey, select an instance from this menu”. “Wtf is an instance?”
Voyager gets around this by defaulting to an instance (lemmy.ee I think) before you log in, but my plan was to have them select when they launch the app for the first time.
What I want to avoid is “hey, select an instance from this menu”. “Wtf is an instance?”
Indeed, so just give them a link to an instance. Nowadays I give
- https://discuss.online/ if you’re American
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you’re European
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
- Feel free if you have any questions
Picking a default instance seems like the right approach.
Funny personalities don’t make people laugh, and therefore aren’t really funny. They’re more patronizing and infantalizing.
Should I explain that not all planets live in the same Federation? I’m thinking no.
I think you’ve already gone astray from really explaining the (relatively simple) relationship between federated instances. It’s already confusing because you’re trying to make it fun.
I say, give your app whatever functionality you think is best, and the aesthetic/style/personality you think is best, but don’t worry about making the fediverse “fun.” Fun descriptions actually distract from the information.
A bit like this?
Ooo yes! But I would like keep it much shorter.
I did one of the subtitle translations a while back, seem to remember it had to be done with open/free use licence. I’d be surprised if you can’t just re-edit the video to make it shorter and more to the point.
I’ll look into it, thanks! Maybe I’ll run it by a non technical friend and see if they get it.
Alternative: just send them to World and do not even mention the whole federation thing. Federation is essentially a power feature for a few people who care about it.
For normies, the real killer USP will be something much simpler: no ads.
That’s bad. LW is already dominating the Lemmyverse. I’d say just send them to one of the top 10 or 20 instances at random.
I’d agree. And LW isn’t a particularly nice place anyways. It’s just the biggest. And if our core features aren’t important to us, we might as well send users to any arbitrary place. That doesn’t need to be Lemmy.
That’s an idea too. But personally I think this worrying about the dominance of a single site is a bit misplaced, assuming that the server uses the same software and protocols. There’s advantages in having some centralization. More resources can be put into the chosen instance to improve its reliability and its moderation. These need to be absolute priorities when trying to attract new users.
A certain encyclopedia site has a de-facto monopoly of the encyclopedia space. That’s not a problem because it has the right governance and ownership structure. I think the discussion space could perhaps use a similar site.
It would be the nail in the coffin for me to block .world, and I imagine more instances would end up defederating
This. Pick and instance and roll with it. Most ppl won’t notice nor care about the federation.
What I could do is pick an instance at random and see if I can write that instance to app storage that persists on reinstall. That way, they don’t lose their account by not remembering what instance. That doesn’t solve the web.
The issue is password managers save username and password, but I need to save instance as a 3rd value. I wonder if I can prepend the instance to the front of their username in a way that the password manager picks it up, then slice it off later when they log in. But that’s kinda hacky.
Usernames include the instance, @moseschrute@lemmy.world
I’m so dumb. That literally solves so many problems. I just have to confirm that works with the login endpoint. Thanks!Edit: I’m not dumb. You can’t login with your instance at the end of the username. I also need to check if @ is a valid username character.
You know, I would pick instances that aren’t federated with hexbear or Lemmygrad.
My analigy:
You have a Reddit account. You recently bought a Honda Civic, and know there’s a web forum for civic owners over there, called hondacivicforum. You would like to participate in it.
You can just subscribe to the forum topics you care about from your Reddit account. No need to create a new account.
Also, you have family on Facebook that posts updates and photos and whatnot. You can follow them, too, and reply to their posta without needing a Facebook account.
You use Reddit. You can interact with content outaide of Reddit from Reddit.
Tada.
The Fediverse is a bunch of pirate and free trade ships that pass messages around with one another.
Pick a ship and let’s get going!
Then show a list of the top instances. e.g. lemm.ee has the maximum amount of content, but at the cost of including all known trolling instances - Alt-Right, Alt-Left, and otherwise. lemmynsfw.com for, you know, porn, but many people block it as a result. Themed instances for Star Trek, Star Wars, anarchy, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, computer programming, gaming, anime, climate change, general science, etc. Or location based like aussie.zone for Australia, lemmy.ca for Canada, feddit.org for Germany, feddit.uk for UK, jlai.lu for France, Discuss.Online for USA, etc.
Sorting the list at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list can help. Unfortunately it requires 2 clicks after following that link to see what I mean, as the URL won’t provide a sort ordering.
For the examples given, you could make links that show the feed sorted by Local and Active, to show what kind of content is most readily accessible there - e.g. this link, and therefore would have the least amount of federation (message passing) issues especially delays.
For the most part I would avoid instances having only a single admin as there can be problems with that, like them not responding quickly to a request to make a new account, or in the worst case what happened with Ernst at Kbin.social or dmv.social or so on where when the single person called it quits then the entire instance disappeared.
Which boat you choose can have a MASSIVE difference in how you experience the Fediverse - e.g. check out how different lemmy.ml looks from Lemmy.ca - bc of how many people will straight up block your entire instance (e.g. I have blocked all users from Lemmy.ml, bc I don’t enjoy those type of tankie/Alt-Left messages in my feed).
Nowadays I give
- https://discuss.online/ if you’re American
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you’re European
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
- Feel free if you have any questions
Beautiful! 😍
After all the other comments I was thinking randomly auto select one of the instances that meets certain criteria, but you make a good argument. Giving people choice over their server was what I was initially thinking when I came up with this planet analogy.
I guess that would work. It’s kind of like you’re on Mos Eisley in the cantina bar. But you’re from planet B and the person you’re talking to is from planet C. Respectively, you’re talking to a bunch of random people from all kinds of corners of the universe. And there are several bars. Some bars look the same (franchise?) but are on different planets.
And thanks to a brain implant you can’t see or be seen by aliens from specific planets because they are outlawed on your home plannet
Right, good point. You’d better move to a different planet then, that’d change your surname and replaces the implant with a different one. You can stay at the bar though. Or you build your own planet / theme park with blackjack and hookers…
Edit: And by the way OP: I’ve had some success with these modern AI image generators. If you want to come up with some concept art or placeholder images, you might want to check out these AI tools and let them draw some planets. That might not be 100% what you’re looking for, but it should be enough to get you started.
I honestly don’t like default instance approach. I think people should be able to select tags and they’d get communities recommended with maybe a flag of the country where it comes from next to it and like just a list of blocked communities from that home (inaccesible planets) and like a short description. I don’t think lemmy should become as centralised. I like your idea for that approach. If one community shuts down or like the admins or mods act stupid it would suck for users to not have been given a choice.
A default instance is not ideal, but adding a barrier to joining is counterproductive. If someone has an interest in a specific area, they should be directed to join programming.dev or slrpnk.net etc. If they want a general purpose instance, then they should just be assigned a default.
Personally, I started the signup multiple times because there are hundreds of servers and if you haven’t already used the platform it’s impossible to know what you need.
Anyway, more than promoting Lemmy as a platform, we should be promoting Lemmy content. Mostly it is publicly visible without an account, and if someone sees Lemmy links 5-10 times, they may start wondering what they are missing out on.
That’s what I was thinking! But I’m not sure that is better than just randomizing the default instance. Randomizing would have almost the same effect with much less user friction.
The best analogy for me would be to use something the person you’re explaining to already uses. For example, if they’re a reddit user, I just say imagine everyone has the capability to create their own reddit website, and everyone’s reddit sites can be interconnected and you can choose to join whichever site you want and see content from the other sites. If they’re coming from twitter, just change the it from reddit to twitter. It’s much easier than using the email analogy.
I don’t understand the difficulty in understanding the fediverse. It’s just linked instances (servers), that can share posts if they want to. Pick one you like and sign up. Done.
If that’s too hard for people they probably don’t belong here.
I don’t think the fediverse needs a fancy explanation that is non-boring. Either you care about federation and the decentralized control of the fediverse and it makes sense to you. Or you don’t care and those features then become roadblocks to getting on boarded.
