this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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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 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.
I guess the concept of fediverse is what will end up confusing people more than ever. There's a very good quick starter guide published on Lemmy that I found to be incredibly helpful. Including the clarification that content is accessible across servers but users cannot log in to other servers.
I also think it will be crucial how the app ecosystem for Lemmy shapes up. Most people will just be using an app to access their communities and won't care about the underlying fediverse structure.
Here's hoping for all the apps, which made Reddit what it is/was, to come to roost quickly for Lemmy!
That's a good point! Put a slick enough front end on a platform and the vast majority of new users won't care about the back end for sure.
You're absolutely right, the app ecosystem will be crucial to its success and keeping it around. Jerboa is fine, but it's fairly lackluster, and is the only Android client I've found. Not to discredit the dev/team for Jerboa at all, it's actually quite good, until you compare it to the various third-party Reddit clients I've been using for decades.
I'm hoping lots of growth for Lemmy and the fediverse and that with that, the app ecosystem scales well, too!
Here's hoping that the Lemmy API proxy can expedite a transition to allow these apps to stay useful after June 30th. It would be a beautiful sight to have diversity of clients here, and especially supporting the fediverse answer to Reddit instead of the centralized competition.
I would even be happy to see kbin growth because we on Lemmy don't lose out π
Iβm pretty dumb and I havenβt been confused. I just got here, subbed to a bunch of stuff, and my subscribed list is full of clickable subs to go to.
Itβs very βReddityβ in that respect as far as Iβm concerned. Iβm not lost at all.
On the upside, it at least limits participants to people who really want to be here.
Absolutely a good point!
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.
This explanation helped, thanks!
They are like town full of holograms of buildings in other towns.
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 theyβre already familiar with.
I think the communities within communities (multiple servers with their own communities each) issue can be abstracted away by a good app, the experience could look roughly the same as regular Reddit.
The fact that accounts are separated and individual to each server, in a way that you can't login with your current account into a different one and someone could poach your username, is what I see as a much bigger issue for casual users in the future.
Hmm. Third party apps, you say? What an intriguing concept.
Too soon, dude. Iβm still traumatised.
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 [email protected] and [email protected]
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.
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 arenβt locked into only talking to gmail users.
It does make discovering new communities a little more difficult because they wonβt 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