Comment on Onboarding experience needs to be simpler for mass adoption
Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 week agoBeing 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.
rako@piefed.social 1 week ago
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
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Can you expand that last line? I don’t understand clearly what you mean.
rako@piefed.social 1 week ago
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