I’m assuming most of us here want a large community. The reality is most people aren’t into technology nearly as much as many of the people actually on the Fediverse. For other people who are into tech (like myself and a lot of people here), the federation technology itself being promoted as a core component of the appeal makes sense, but for your average person? They just don’t care, and they shouldn’t have to in order to experience the best things about the Fediverse.
Federation, ActivityPub, and even open source are like “buzzwords” to most people. Yet, when I’ve seen federated software recommended on other social media websites, every article and many times, we tell everyone about the underlying technology first and THEN about how they actually compare to Twitter/Reddit/etc., on a feature basis, as well as about the community of people actually here. It should be the other way around. Why are we telling people about the tech first over the actual social aspect?
This place can’t rely solely on mass exoduses from Reddit and Twitter for new members. We’ve got to get out there and tell people why it’s good. Right now, by many people, it’s viewed at best as the “Next best thing” and at worst as “over-complicated social media”.
People who do come here should learn about the underlying technology and its implications for them. If someone is willing to come here, by all means, tell them about the benefits and drawbacks of the underlying decentralized technology. Understanding how it works is pretty important anyway in the case they’d like to move their account to another instance or view posts from other instances. However, for someone who isn’t here, the case can be made that it makes things seem less user-friendly to begin with. Countless times, I’ve seen people on the Fediverse who still barely understand how federation works. The paralyzing choice of picking an instance to join alone could make someone back away from Mastodon and just stick with Twitter.
Telling them about tech-related things that they don’t know about or aren’t really interested in doesn’t help much. The local artist down the street likely doesn’t care about having a deep understanding about federation works or the benefits of decentralized versus centralized social media. They just want somewhere to post their art for others to see and comment on others in their space.
All in all, this post is meant to target our methods of telling people about the Fediverse. We, as a community, have to be better at making this place more user-friendly. This isn’t a post to criticize federation and ActivityPub themselves, but rather about how we tell people about the Fediverse through word of mouth.
I’ve been thinking about how a short questionaire during onboarding would be great. You answer a branching set of 10 yes/no, one or the other, questions max regarding how they’re using socmed, whether they’re into this and that, that leads them to an instance that suits them the most.
I like this idea, but I also studied computer science. From a user’s perspective, I think we can and should dumb it down further:
Automatically choose one instance for new users. With a sophisticated algorithm or simply pick one at random, I don’t care.
And most users probably won’t care either. If they do, they can migrate to another instance. At that point, they know better what this is all about and can make an informed decision.
We trade the worries and time spent by new users trying to understand the system and their needs, against the worries and time spent by more experienced users which instance they might like better.