This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
How do you plan on improving the onboarding/sign-up process for newcomers, especially when they have little to no understanding about the Fediverse?
See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2337049
Is it hard? Didn’t seem hard.
“Join a server” was enough to kill all interest for plenty of Twitter users looking at Mastodon.
So instead of “Join a server”, maybe something like, “Pick your Home. While the Lemmy is connected by this thing we like to call The Fediverse, choosing a Home for your account is like choosing who you want to share a dorm with. You aren’t necessarily alike, but can see yourself living with and around these people. And because of this Fediverse, you can still visit all the other dorms, friends houses, and even a back alley or two.”
In all honesty, any sort of picking or choosing will turn off casual users. Ideally there’d be a button that automatically redirects you to the sign-up page of a random smaller trusted instance.
@HKayn @HR_Pufnstuf A wizard that gives you a random choice based on your interests could be an interesting tool from a UX perspective. Questions to refine down the options could be based on language, specialized vs generalist, categories within specialized, number of users (S, M, L) age of the instance
I’d be fine with that, if we can have some sort of HA ranking for the servers out there. To be on the list of random servers they should be able to maintain decent uptime and combat threats and DDOS swiftly. Oh, and be on a non-free and stable DNS domain… that .ml fiasco sucked. Not the server admins fault, but it did suck. Last thing we want are newcomers having their instance disappear. That was my experience… got nestled into my first lemmy home for it to fall to the great .ml purge of 2023. I lamented a week, hoping for it’s return… Finally giving up and joining lemmy.world. And while it’s nice, it seems to get taken down by attacks a LOT. :(
For me it, wasn’t too hard since by various metrics I am what’d you call a “power user”, but for those who aren’t, it could take a while to get their head around the Fediverse.