Onboarding experience needs to be simpler for mass adoption
-
I've seen people using Voyager for a year and not even knowing what their instance is. They seem content, vote, post just like on Reddit.
People can drive a car without knowing what type of engine it is. They turn the wheel, it turns.
-
join-lemmy.org tried that approach, the experience is subpar: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536
-
Makes sense once there's enough of a userbase....but currently there isn't a huge amount of content of interest on Lemmy and sticking to a local instance just limits this even more. Currently I have to stick to "all" as even areas of subscription can run out of content with a quick scroll session.
-
unique interest or theme will determine the type and feel of content in your local feed
Then selection of interests and themes should be included in the onboarding process, instead of the mumbo-jumbo about choosing instances.
-
We just need good defaults.
Sure driving a 2 ton box around takes skill, but we should still make it as easy and smooth ride as possible.
Add Power Steering, Climate Control, ABS, Navigation, a Radio etc.We shouldn't give people a shitbox and expect them to enjoy driving it, especially when they're used to better.
If we don't fix our bad UX, we're going to filter out all non tech savvy people, and create a bubble.
-
That's a great analogy, but it's too big a barrier for many, most give up before picking a instance, we should set good defaults and then the users can figure it out once they are used to the platform.
-
Default way to access the platform for the average potential news joiners is mobile
Voyager, Thunder, Artic provide good defaults.
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Your instance is defederated from four other instances, so yeah it has an influence.
-
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?
-
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
Eeww, apps.
