Comment on New to Lemmy. I have a couple of questions.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 weeks agoWell, 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:
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.
Asudox@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Why? That’s really ineffective and just looks bad imo. That’s just a solution to people linking instances to join instead of leading people to join-lemmy.org.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 weeks ago
Because what the user wants is to sign up on Lemmy. We have to meet them at exactly that point. When they click on "Sign up". And then our motive comes at play. We want to say to them »Hey stop, In case you don't know, the Fediverse works differently than other social media platforms you might be used to. You have to make a decision here.« And I think it's super effective to do it at that point. Doing it later is too late, because then they're already signed up on a random place without being informed. And doing it earlier is inconvenient. They might not be motivated to find out yet. Or it's a hassle to gather that info yourself without even knowing it's a thing.
And why is the way the Fediverse works looking bad? If it seems that way to you, you're might be wrong here. So even more reason to prominently display these kinds of things.
And it doesn't have to be complicated. As with software design in general, don't overwhelm the user with options. Just offer a description on what's happening and why. And give some sane default options. Don't make it more than let's say 5-10. And it's just one click more in the process. It's not too hard for the user to click once more if it's for a good cause. And if done right, they coould just randomly click on something if in doubt.
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
Asudox@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
A default option is bad imo. We want a decentralized platform. Distribution will keep the fediverse alive and well. Maybe a dynamic “default” option would be one solution. One that just changes the default option to a different somewhat known instance once the current default option reaches a certain user count. For this to work, you’d need to lead people to join-lemmy.org.