Tricky thing is going to be the onboarding process for laypeople. Problem with the fediverse is helping people wrap their heads around servers. People think the server is the “community.” And it kind of is, and it kind of isn’t. Servers are a community of people, but severs also host capital C “Communities” within them.
This is probably the biggest thing holding back the adoption of the fediverse. This user experience problem hasn’t been cracked. Onboarding isn’t intuitive.
I completely agree. It was super confusing figuring out how to access communities from other servers, and I consider myself a very tech-literate person. The Digg -> reddit transition didn’t require understanding a whole new paradigm when signing up.
My understanding is (and if I’m wrong, someone please correct me) instances/servers are like little towns with their own communities. But you’re not limited to just your town and your communities. You’re free to visit any town and join any of their communities.
I’m sure it’s much more convoluted than that, this was just my simple understanding of it.
Putting it in terms of email is the simplest to me. And it works because email itself is federated.
You join a server (gmail, aol, yahoo, proton mail, whatever provider you choose), and from there you can communicate with any other email provider. You aren’t locked into only talking to gmail users.
It does make discovering new communities a little more difficult because they won’t show up for your local feed by default, but that can be handled down the road a little ways to put that all in the background and link all the servers so that the experience for the user is similar to how Reddit used to be.
Its not like email because when you open your email you dont accidentally wander into another email server where the only way to reply is by copy and pasting a nonobvious code and searching through an interface that isnt identified and doesnt work.
Email server were totally invisible to users and i wish everyone would stop bsing to the contrary. It is a backend conparison not of utility to end users.
Once subscribed to a community replies seem pretty seamless
At the moment an issue I have is links in the jerboa app don’t open the community but instead open a web link to that instance which then causes problems with replying similar to what you described
The confusion is the signup process and front page
If when you joined instead of picking a user name it was username @lemmy.world or @beehaw.org then people would see it more like an email address.
Then when you reach the front page instead of showing server admin picks, it should show a list of popular communities across servers and then the alternative local version with some text at the top explaining multiple versions of some communities exist and you can subscribe to both.
Well you can subscribe to more than one, and it might be that some communities have different rules to others, for example one might be focused on news while another might allow self promotion or technical questions.
I definitely agree with this. I’m a very tech-savvy person and while I think I understand how it all works, I am confident there are plenty of people that will look at Lemmy and the fediverse and go “uhhhh…nope I guess?”
Tricky thing is going to be the onboarding process for laypeople. Problem with the fediverse is helping people wrap their heads around servers. People think the server is the “community.” And it kind of is, and it kind of isn’t. Servers are a community of people, but severs also host capital C “Communities” within them.
This is probably the biggest thing holding back the adoption of the fediverse. This user experience problem hasn’t been cracked. Onboarding isn’t intuitive.
I completely agree. It was super confusing figuring out how to access communities from other servers, and I consider myself a very tech-literate person. The Digg -> reddit transition didn’t require understanding a whole new paradigm when signing up.
My understanding is (and if I’m wrong, someone please correct me) instances/servers are like little towns with their own communities. But you’re not limited to just your town and your communities. You’re free to visit any town and join any of their communities.
I’m sure it’s much more convoluted than that, this was just my simple understanding of it.
Towns and communities is a really good analogy.
Honestly, a simple little language change like that, if adopted by the developers, might simplify onboarding a for people.
When you introduce new tech, the best way to onboard folks is to use metaphor and to reference patterns they’re already familiar with.
They are like town full of holograms of buildings in other towns.
This explanation helped, thanks!
Putting it in terms of email is the simplest to me. And it works because email itself is federated.
You join a server (gmail, aol, yahoo, proton mail, whatever provider you choose), and from there you can communicate with any other email provider. You aren’t locked into only talking to gmail users.
It does make discovering new communities a little more difficult because they won’t show up for your local feed by default, but that can be handled down the road a little ways to put that all in the background and link all the servers so that the experience for the user is similar to how Reddit used to be.
Its not like email because when you open your email you dont accidentally wander into another email server where the only way to reply is by copy and pasting a nonobvious code and searching through an interface that isnt identified and doesnt work.
Email server were totally invisible to users and i wish everyone would stop bsing to the contrary. It is a backend conparison not of utility to end users.
Once subscribed to a community replies seem pretty seamless
At the moment an issue I have is links in the jerboa app don’t open the community but instead open a web link to that instance which then causes problems with replying similar to what you described
The confusion is the signup process and front page
If when you joined instead of picking a user name it was username @lemmy.world or @beehaw.org then people would see it more like an email address.
Then when you reach the front page instead of showing server admin picks, it should show a list of popular communities across servers and then the alternative local version with some text at the top explaining multiple versions of some communities exist and you can subscribe to both.
Oh boy, I’m more confused now!
So there are global and local communities?
well for example there is !photography@lemmy.world and !photography@lemmy.ml
Oh, no, that’s confusing…
Fight to the death between forums I guess
Well you can subscribe to more than one, and it might be that some communities have different rules to others, for example one might be focused on news while another might allow self promotion or technical questions.
I definitely agree with this. I’m a very tech-savvy person and while I think I understand how it all works, I am confident there are plenty of people that will look at Lemmy and the fediverse and go “uhhhh…nope I guess?”
That’s unfortunate.
On the upside, it at least limits participants to people who really want to be here.
Absolutely a good point!