Onboarding experience needs to be simpler for mass adoption
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Your mother would ask you what the hell an "instance" was and then think that picking one meant she couldn't look at posts from any others.
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I think this should be baked into client apps.
The popular email analogy works here too. When you are setting up a new phone, you get a default email client app that offers you to log in or sign up to the default email service. And usually user can choose to log in with their service if choice, for which they have to sign up in advance outside the client app.
Having a default Fediverse client on new phones is not happening anytime soon, but if someone's mother installs a client app from the store link sent to them by a family member, she can get similar default onboarding experience.
Default instance can be picked by geo location, or maybe the less used out of 3 most popular instances. Or even maybe an instance ran by the client app developers.
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Voyager defaults to lemm.ee IIRC
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Good tech is easy an intuitive. Computers got popular after you could use a mouse and got a gui. Ipods dominated over the competition because of how dumb easy it was to use. Reddit was easy to move to from Digg because it was pretty much a clone in how it worked. Zero learning curve.
Popular tech is almost always easy.
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It's not that the local tab replaces your home 'subscriptions' tab, it's that it's nice to have in addition to it.
My instance, slrpnk.net, caters to solarpunk topics only, and we're small enough that it has a tight community of regular posters whom I recognize. In my local tab I can see at a glance just the stuff posted to my community, with my other subscriptions not mixed in and cluttering it up. I also see in my local tab what's being posted in communities I'm not subscribed to, but will often have comments from our members since we all collectively view our local tab. It's like a sort've town square feel that my all and subscriptions tab don't have.
I like having access to both.
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A part of the problem is that there are multiple similar general topic instances/sites to choose from. If there were more dissimilar, specific topic instances/sites it might help reduce the choice paralysis a little.
It might even better help highlight the perks of federation, as it would be easier to be like, "See, even though you're on cuteanimals.posts, you can still check out and comment on stuff besides cute animals if you want."
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See, this falls apart when there's another instance that focuses on solarpunk. When some communities on that instance become more popular and active than the communities in your local instance, you'd want to be subscribed to the solar punk communities on that new instance too. Now, your local feed is only showing you solarpunk communities hosted on slrpnk.net but not solarpunk communities on other instances. This distinction is not meaningful because where a community is hosted can be totally detached from the content. The users you know by handle can also be very active, if not more active, on other instances talking about solarpunk than slrpnk.net.
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I don't think the existence of a second solarpunk instance would negate my experience with the first instance. It would still apply, there would just be another place where that same phenomena is happening for a different group of people.
That's not to say that I couldn't subscribe to their communities and get to know the regulars there too, but it would be more norrowed since I would only see the ones I specifically subscribe to, where as with my local tab I see the totality of what's posted to my 'home'.
If you personally don't care about that specific experience that a local tab can bring and think your curated subscriptions is just as good if not better, awesome, more power to you.
But for me specifically, and possibly for others as well, it's a noticeable difference and a welcome addition to our experience
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You're welcome to improve the text. That said the site is in large part aimed at instance admins and technical people. For normal users it's better to link them directly to a specific instance.
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Who gets to decide which instances match that description? Everyone will come up with a slightly different list.
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I think the replies in this thread are doing a good job making OP's point honestly
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Not all places did:
Some sites/apps had filters to hide low effort people.
Some had strict rules that were enforced, so even if you were clueless coming in, you would upskill fast while using it.
Some had a good onboarding course maing upskilling a breeze. -
Can you expand that last line? I don't understand clearly what you mean.
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Browsers are not supposed to be only "html document viewers". In spec parlance, they are supposed to be agents for doing whatever the user wants to do: that's why they also offer facilities for passwords, for example.
The fediverse is a bunch of web servers each with the accounts on it. When I am subscribed on instance A and go on an account on instance B, today the browser acts as a document viewer: I can see what the profile wants to show me, hopefully it has a button that properly redirects me but then I leave the context of the message I was looking at.
What I want instead is for the browser itself to offer me fediverse actions: like, comment, reply, directly from where the content I'm interacting with is. I don't expect browsers to do that soon so the next best thing is web extensions
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I've said it before but join-fediverse needs to ask a few simple questions to walk new users through a decision tree that offers them a couple of instances at the end of the process:
- What service are you looking for?
- Where are you located?
- What languages do you speak?
- What are your interests?
This is just what I'd do if someone asked.me about joining the Fediverse and should help minimise decision paralysis.
