Onboarding experience needs to be simpler for mass adoption
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Default way to access the platform for the average potential news joiners is mobile
Voyager, Thunder, Artic provide good defaults.
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Whether or not we want mass adoption I can't say, but what we don't want is to have a filter that only tech savvy people get past.
We want all kinds of people on Lemmy, not just tech savvy people that push through the bad UX
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Unique interests can be already be self-curated by subscribing to certain communities. All apps have the subscribed feed. There's no need for communities of a certain type to be on one instance.
Edit: typo
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There’s no need for communities of a certain type to be on one instance.
It's nice to have country or language-communities in the local feed of one instance. Feddit.org or jlai.lu are good examples.
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That’s why I when I recommend lemmy to people I just send a link to an instance I think they’ll like. Instead of explaining the whole thing. If they join the instance with time federation will start to make sense to them and they might migrate later on.
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This isn’t always the case though. That’s just one example of difference between instances.
Instances can change everything, from being able to view nsfw content, if you can upvote or not, and who you can talk too (big difference between instances federated with ML/grad/hexbear and not.
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The difference is that the email provider you chose won't make it so you can't send an email to your friends because your providers don't talk to one another.
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Your instance is defederated from four other instances, so yeah it has an influence.
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What happened to hexbear? I mean, I blocked the whole instance so I didn't have to read their crap any more, but did it disappear?
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I'm not sure your car analogy is a great one since most drivers are awful, don't respect the vehicle nor the responsibility they carry by piloting one, and tens of thousands of people die in car accidents every year. lol
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Where/how do I check or know what impact that has? I think this just further strengthens the point that Lemmy is not welcoming to normal users at all and is just for specialist nerds.
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This.
There are rough edges to the actual onboarding experience, of course, but the joinlemmy and joinmastodon and joinwahtever websites really aren't a part of it. They're more of an ad for admins, demonstrating that there's an active network of sites already using the product. The fact that not even the product develoeprs seem to understand this is a real issue, though.
Honestly, we need to stop sending people to "Lemmy" or "Mastodon" or whatever. Those are website engines. It's like sending someone to "WordPress" when you want them to read your blog.
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Eeww, apps.
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I look at it this way. If my grandma asks me how to “the email”, I’m not going to explain to her how she could choose outlook or gmail or whatever. I’m just going to choose and send the one I think is easiest for her to set up.
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Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren't intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can't really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.
The fact that "Lemmy" isn't a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you "saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning" and it be a meaningful statement. You can't substitute "Lemmy" into that sentence, though, because there isn't a Lemmy.
There's a thousand Lemmys.
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Also everyone wants different driving experiences, the driving experience varies widely from clubtry to country and state/province to state/province, and everyone wants different features and capabilities in their cars.
Cars are a great comparison, although there are also people who don't drive for a wife variety of reasons...
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But it's better from many angles that they are. Discoverability alone. Consistency of instance level rules. Theme.
It just makes sense on some level that sports communities would be on a sports-focused website, and such a website is where people whose primary interest is in discussing sports would have their accounts. From there, they can follow other topics they're interested in, but their primary focus is still on, I don't know, basketball or whatever.
Same for cars. Some of the most active forums on the internet are car ownership forums. If you could access CivicForums from IoniqForums, then it would make sense to do so. Much more sense than finding people discussing Hondas on lemmy.world and Hyundais on sh.itjust.works.
Just because you don't give a shit where these discussions are taking place, doesn't mean it makes sense for people to just shit them out anywhere.
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The onboarding process should be happening after this point. People shouldn't be going "I want to join Lemmy!", because that's kind of a non-sensical statement. Lemmy is a website engine. They should be going "I want to join awesomewebsite.com. Oh, and look, I can see stuff from anotheraweseomewebsite.net, too! That's so cool!"
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No, that's not true. The big email providers absolutely block smaller and personal hosts. There's a whole system of features and options you need to install and support in order to get through the door, thanks to spammers.
