If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can't be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don't know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won't work.

My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: "Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net/. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances."

For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.

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[–] rako@piefed.social 55 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I think everyone agrees that the fediverse experience is highly different from the centralized experience, but I disagree that the fediverse must necessarily hide what it is and reproduce such a centralized system.

We've been fed the lie that tech is "easy" when it isn't at all, but that is not a problem. Driving a 2 tons box around at hundreds of km/h takes some skill, some time to learn, but we don't consider it too hard and skippable. I think we should put our efforts into simplifying the explanations, showing what it brings and what you lose, if we want more people to join (and I do)

[–] AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We just need good defaults.

Sure driving a 2 ton box around takes skill, but we should still make it as easy and smooth ride as possible. Add Power Steering, Climate Control, ABS, Navigation, a Radio etc.

We shouldn't give people a shitbox and expect them to enjoy driving it, especially when they're used to better.

If we don't fix our bad UX, we're going to filter out all non tech savvy people, and create a bubble.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Default way to access the platform for the average potential news joiners is mobile

Voyager, Thunder, Artic provide good defaults.

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world -5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Eeww, apps.

[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What is wrong with apps? I get a lot of great features from the one I use that I don't get with the web client.

multi-communities
user tagging
drafts
keyword blocking
themes
customizeable ui
etc

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Most of them space things out in ways I don't like and I hate gestures because I do things accidentally all the time. I can keyword block througb ublock origjn, although I do understand it is easier in most apps.

User tagging is the only feature I feel like I'm missing on default mobile lemmy.

I have also hit app fatigue. Just fucking sick to death of having a massive number of separate things that could be done through the browser.

[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fair enough reasons. If you're doing custom ublock filters and such, you're likely able to tweak a lot to how you want it without any outside help from an app.

I see in you rother comment to someone you haven't tried Voyager in a year. I haven't tried that one recently, but I will say even over the last 6-8 months, so many of these apps have really matured from where they were a year or so ago. Very significantly so IMO. I think Summit is really the sleeper champ of the apps for my use case, and the dev is super helpful and responsive.

To each their own though. I love we have such great variety in UI here. At this point, there should be a couple viable options for near anyone.

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I loved rif as the mobile app for reddit because reddit's mobile site has always been trash and the rif experience was so much better. I'm glad there are options for those who want them, and the desire for user tagging might lead me to trying something out eventually.

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

voyager is available as a web app if you’d rather use your browser vger.app

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world -2 points 1 week ago

Tried it a year ago and didn't like it.

[–] Thatuserguy@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Honestly to a certain extent I think being decentralized is somewhat beneficial. Perhaps it's just the fact I've been visiting forums for like 20 years and feeling jaded, but I never liked that any knuckle dragger could easily make an account and act like an ass.

It's not a very high bar to clear to figure out how to sign up for lemmy, so if you can't even figure that out, maybe it's for the best to help prevent polluting the user pool. If you're gonna be an ass, you should at least have to work for it.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren't intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can't really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.

The fact that "Lemmy" isn't a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you "saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning" and it be a meaningful statement. You can't substitute "Lemmy" into that sentence, though, because there isn't a Lemmy.

There's a thousand Lemmys.

[–] rako@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Spot on. Focusing on the software is the most tech-centered approach one can do, unfortunately tech people suck at make something excellent for non-tech people.

People don't like it but we need to put more focus on the fediverse as a network, say the AP word exactly once as to not confuse, but always operate in that state of mind.

And tech people must build a web extension to do fediverse stuff while being somewhere on the web ! That's what a User Agent is for, doing stuff for me

[–] ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Can you expand that last line? I don't understand clearly what you mean.

[–] rako@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago

Browsers are not supposed to be only "html document viewers". In spec parlance, they are supposed to be agents for doing whatever the user wants to do: that's why they also offer facilities for passwords, for example.

The fediverse is a bunch of web servers each with the accounts on it. When I am subscribed on instance A and go on an account on instance B, today the browser acts as a document viewer: I can see what the profile wants to show me, hopefully it has a button that properly redirects me but then I leave the context of the message I was looking at.

What I want instead is for the browser itself to offer me fediverse actions: like, comment, reply, directly from where the content I'm interacting with is. I don't expect browsers to do that soon so the next best thing is web extensions

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 week ago

Good tech is easy an intuitive. Computers got popular after you could use a mouse and got a gui. Ipods dominated over the competition because of how dumb easy it was to use. Reddit was easy to move to from Digg because it was pretty much a clone in how it worked. Zero learning curve.

Popular tech is almost always easy.

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This account is new, but I trust it.

[–] rako@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks ! I'm active on the fediverse under other accounts, but I wanted to try the piefed experience as The Devs intended