I read something recently that gave me food for thought. An alternative has to be 10x better for people to switch; and the core experience is what convinces people, not cool extra features.
I don't know how universally applicable it is, but I wonder how Mastodon stacks up in that. Personally I think it's 10x better, but is it really? Or more importantly, are we communicating clearly that it is?
@Gargron I think instance selection is a huge roadblock.
Keep laughing, but: dynamically generated instances as a default sign up, including a dynamically generated cute name and logo. Once the person count hits Dunbar's number, a new instance automatically spins up.
Pooling new people together gives them the opportunity to meet each other and create their own culture.
Of course this would just be a default option for someone who doesn't already have a specific instance in mind.
@mhu2141ai @Gargron yes, centralization is a point of concern. Maybe the new auto-generated instances could expire and force people elsewhere after a time limit.
My concern is that the onboarding process is simply too arduous for all but elite or highly motivated people.
@kai I apologize for the tone -- it's just that things looking to maximize user count / "engagement" have been universally terrible IME and selecting for people who make a baseline effort helps. If people aren't thinking about who moderates their instance, their experience will probably end up suffering for it anyway, and -everyone- loses if you have a flood of people who don't know wtf they're doing
@mhu2141ai no need to apologize; I'm no social media philosopher or anything.
I just remember a reddit april fools' day where you got placed in a chatroom with one other person and then the rooms got joined so it was 4 people and that kept happening and you could vote when to stop growing the community. It was really interesting. I think a similar experiment would be interesting with activitypub.
@kai Yeah, as an experiment and not a general purpose feature that sounds fun
@mhu2141ai it solves other onboarding problems though ๐
@kai I'll reiterate: anyone who can't spend 10-15 minutes selecting an instance deserves 0 onboarding, and onboarding them would likely be a detriment
@elomatreb @kai which takes another 5.
@elomatreb @kai I really do not think this is half as difficult as you're making it
@elomatreb @kai Honestly I see no issue even with that, nor any way to automate it sanely if there was
@elomatreb @kai Yeah, I'm willing to concede a fair bit of what I said for that to remain...
@elomatreb @kai That sounds fair to me. The original post just gave me horrifying visions and I strongly disagreed with the UX philosophy I think was underlying it
@elomatreb @kai I am -very- happy that was walked back
@elomatreb @kai ("make things easy to do" vs. "do things for me")
@elomatreb @kai Anything you do to that end is necessarily going to involve centralization or lying to people
@elomatreb @mhu2141ai @kai for me personally it was very easy.
I signed up for m.s and once i stayed too long there I knew that I need to move unto a smaller instance.
I chose chaos.social because lots of cool nerds were there. You need to use Mastodon in order to get a sense of what each instance is about. What sort of people come from the instance and what is discussed there.
@saxnot @elomatreb @kai Yeah I mean, that's another thing. It's not that onerous to move once you know some people and have a sense of what instances are out there
@mhu2141ai @elomatreb @kai it's okay to chill on the biggest node for the first couple of months. Even if m.s blocks large parts of the fediverse network.
Maybe there should be some sort of timer in the sense of "okay you're on m.s for 6 months now. It's time to move on [link to instances.social ; link to hosting provider ; link which lists the instances of your followers]
@saxnot @mhu2141ai @elomatreb I already suggested a time limit lol.
@saxnot @elomatreb @mhu2141ai @kai Yes, this was pretty much how it went down for me too....
So having a landing instance you can fully migrate from could be a solution. I don't fully recall the timing but it took about a month before I found the instance I wanted to stick with... and I was a technical, fully motivated user. Something most aren't.
I think you need to find simple ways/features for people to locate people with similar interests.
@shellkr @elomatreb @mhu2141ai @kai i wish there were more book enthusiast instances.
There is this one instance that brands itself as Goodreads Alternative but tbh I think they're more interested in building a parallal universe alltogether.
@mhu2141ai I absolutely disagree with that. There are loads of busy and distracted people in the world who would make great additions to the fediverse, some of my friends included. The concept of joining a new social network is already a tiring one for many people. To maintain the current status quo - where joining this one is a research project - is just a form of gatekeeping.
@kai
@kai (this is a pretty low value of "wtf they're doing" imo -- communication platforms like IRC that used to be pretty damn common require way more, and I still had no real trouble as a 13 y/o figuring out how to use them)
@kai I think a much better solution would be to lower the resource barrier to instance hosting.
@SlightDashOfColour @Gargron there's nothing to stop anyone from going to the instance of their choice and making an account, or hosting their own, and also I see no reason why virt servers need to be a single point of failure.
I'm just trying to think of ways to make onboarding easier.
Everyone can calm down. I'm in no position to implement my ideas, and even if I were, there would be no obligation for anyone to use it.
@kai @Gargron i pondered about this too but having all hosts under the same control would be against the rules of federation.
One needs to seek out individuals willing to take over and moderate each instance. This becomes a very complex task when you just pipe in heterogenous people into an instance with default rules.
Instances are valueable when they're community-driven.
@kai so lets assume we have this sort or instance generation. Every signed up user is then assigned into the currently non-full instance. Once this instaces reaces 250 users it closes registration while still living on the server on which it was created (some big orchestration which is centrally controlled).
Then these 250 people would need to self-organize, fight for leadership and then organize their own rules and coorsinate their server migration.
I don't see this system working.
@kai @gargron and then you've defeated the point of federation