Comment on How to get people to use Mastodon?
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 week ago
On the auto-selector, I’ve said it before but join-fediverse needs to ask a few questions: Service? Location? Language? Hobbies? And then it spits out one or two recommendations, with an option to load more.
While I’d be fine with an auto-selector (as I help Admin feddit.uk), it would miss out on the variety of instances out there - books, games (video, tabletop, etc), franchises, etc that some people might be looking for.
So how about 2 big points: auto-selector (based on location) and answer a couple of questions.
I think the single biggest change that Mastodon can make, as far as this goes, is to shift the Explore->Posts feed to the Home tab. Just do it like Twitter or Bluesky, make the discovery feed the first thing a new user encounters.
Lemmy is better for on-boarding on this front as they have the Local and All feeds from the start. Just having that front and centre (defaulting to Local, as you don’t want to overwhelm them) would be a big help.
gon@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Yup, Lemmy does it really well.
I think that’s totally fine. The big point is that the user shouldn’t choose a server. Answer a few questions that can lead to a server? OK. But as soon as you make someone choose you might be reintroducing that confusion that seems to not be very popular with normies.
Here, I’ll point to this thread by Ted Curran: indieweb.social/@tedcurran/113946323075198755
Also, this reply thread lemm.ee/comment/18473212
Ted talks about how it might be best to simply send people to one instance (a sort of starter instance) and then encourage them to move to a different, more specific one. Other users complain that account migration is insufficient.
Maybe, after improving account migration, we should send users to a few semi-random starter instances that have agreed to a certain set of rules and adhere to a set of quality standards, but then encourage them to leave by migrating their account to an instance that better matches their interests.
From what I’ve gathered with the replies I’ve been getting, this might actually be the best solution, for now. Though, of course, it does include a significant improvement over the tech side, rather than relatively simple UI changes…