There’s also no fix to the “onboarding problem”. That “problem” is the design of federation.
Comment on New to Lemmy. I have a couple of questions.
Asudox@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoNaturally. This is the fediverse, if newbies don’t want to understand how it works even a little bit, they shouldn’t be here.
And lemmy.world won’t shrink. I said “for the time being”, not forever. If LW keeps growing rapidly without giving other instances a chance, then it won’t be any different than Reddit.
Asudox@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 weeks ago
Well, there are some proposals to change this. I'd say it's fixable by technology to some degree. For example instead of a sign up page that directly signs someone up with the specific instance, we could have a more general Fediverse signup page. Maybe ask the new user a few questions what they envision their instance to be. If they're more aligned with this set of rules or the other. If they want "free speech" or a place with more moderation and less argumentative people. And then make some suggestions.
Or instead of just signing them up with whatever instance they visited first, display a list of the current instance and 5 other random ones, shuffle them and make them deliberately click on one of them.
That'd all help. Of course it can't be solved 100%. But we could at least make an effort to do something about it.
Asudox@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That’s literally what join-lemmy.org does. It asks 2 questions:
- What theme they are interested in
- What language they mainly use
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 weeks ago
Yeah. My proposal is to replace the "Sign up" entry on every single instance with a page like that. And move the actual sign up one level further down, so everyone needs to ckick through that process.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
I know if offers options to people, but the majority of people don’t want options, they want a single website
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 weeks ago
I don't think I agree. The big difference in total users and monthly active users tells me lots of people abandon their accounts. As long as that policy is in place, it'll naturally shrink because people leave and there aren't any new users anymore to replace them. The only question is at what rate that's going to happen.
And I also don't agree with people who don't understand the Fediverse shouldn't be here... People should be here because it's a nice place and they have a good time engaging here. The exact technology behind it shouldn't matter too much. If at all.
Asudox@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I never said “people who don’t understand”, I said “people who don’t want to understand”. I am satisfied as long as a newbie knows what the fediverse is, why it is here and what instances are. They are the basics, aren’t they?
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 weeks ago
I'm also not sure about that. Do they really need to be bothered with that? Can't they just expect a social media platform to do whatever? Without learning anything? I mean they might just want to use something and not be bothered. And arguably they'll have more freedom here then they'd have for example on Reddit where this isn't any issue. I'd say design the software to get out of their way, cater for them and have them here. I mean ultimately there is a limit. Sometimes you need to know how things actually work to get anywhere. But I still refuse to accept your point. I think that should be kept to a minimum. And users should be eased into it at the point it becomes necessary to know. That can be done by good software design.
Asudox@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The reason is simply because this is not the kind of social media people have been using for years. Just like how they “learned” how the centralized web works, they also should learn how the decentralized web works. I’m all for the fediverse to grow but I also don’t want ignorant people that don’t want to learn anything about the tech they’ll be using.