Comment on Onboarding experience needs to be simpler for mass adoption
rako@piefed.social 1 year ago
I think everyone agrees that the fediverse experience is highly different from the centralized experience, but I disagree that the fediverse must necessarily hide what it is and reproduce such a centralized system.
We've been fed the lie that tech is "easy" when it isn't at all, but that is not a problem. Driving a 2 tons box around at hundreds of km/h takes some skill, some time to learn, but we don't consider it too hard and skippable. I think we should put our efforts into simplifying the explanations, showing what it brings and what you lose, if we want more people to join (and I do)
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.
Default way to access the platform for the average potential news joiners is mobile
Voyager, Thunder, Artic provide good defaults.
Eeww, apps.
voyager is available as a web app if you’d rather use your browser vger.app
What is wrong with apps? I get a lot of great features from the one I use that I don’t get with the web client.
Honestly to a certain extent I think being decentralized is somewhat beneficial. Perhaps it’s just the fact I’ve been visiting forums for like 20 years and feeling jaded, but I never liked that any knuckle dragger could easily make an account and act like an ass.
It’s not a very high bar to clear to figure out how to sign up for lemmy, so if you can’t even figure that out, maybe it’s for the best to help prevent polluting the user pool. If you’re gonna be an ass, you should at least have to work for it.
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.
Spot on. Focusing on the software is the most tech-centered approach one can do, unfortunately tech people suck at make something excellent for non-tech people.
People don't like it but we need to put more focus on the fediverse as a network, say the A*P* word exactly once as to not confuse, but always operate in that state of mind.
And tech people must build a web extension to do fediverse stuff while being somewhere on the web ! That's what a User Agent is for, doing stuff for me
Can you expand that last line? I don’t understand clearly what you mean.
This account is new, but I trust it.
Thanks ! I'm active on the fediverse under other accounts, but I wanted to try the piefed experience as The Devs intended
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
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.