It stroke me that saying things like “First, you have to choose a comunity to join the fediverse” might be a better way to ease onboarding nwecommers than “First, you have to choose a server”.
Although the latter might be technically more accurate, the former is what people might
- understand better;
- ends up being what they’re really doing;
- frighten them less;
- reinforce the “community” contribution aspect;
- lead them to better understand the federated aspect as they realize that communities are not isolated and can talk to eachother.
What do you think?
“Let me know in the comments bellow…” - just kidding!
Emphasizing moderation differences and such are things best left to discover after the user successfully lands onto the fediverse.
At the start they shouldn’t even have to think about what instance they want to land on. We’re approaching it with the mindset that they “want to join Lemmy/Piefed” — that’s not right!
They should want to join a specific community, and the server just happens to be whatever they find first.
Let’s say I like Star Trek. I shouldn’t have to be redirected to startrek.website. I should be able to see the community, think “cool I want to participate”, and sign up, even if where I landed happens to be feddit, db0, or a random NodeBB instance.
That’s another issue I have: Maybe that could be resolved by implementing something similar to (or exactly) openid.
I feel the software we choose might limits us on the kind of thing we’re interested in, that’s why I have to have a lemmy account - I wouldn’t have a discussion like this one on mastodon, for example - and a mastodon account. Maybe a pixelfed account, a peertube account… what a mess! But that’s a subject for another discussion (this discussion was “Permanently Deleted”?!).