> definitely better to blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service
Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd.
This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds thinking about onboarding. Perfect is the enemy of good.
> Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd.
So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?
Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies? You are the archetypal technical person snapping about the workaround instead of engaging with the user problem. If everyone can have access to all the content (which is what most people want), why are they being herded into choosing an instance in the first place?
Federation might run 100x better if instances were suggested based on geographic proximity rather than semantics, a concept which makes intuitive sense to people. 'Pick from a random and inconsistent list of servers in no particular order' is like demanding that people who are considering taking a holiday decide where to eat lunch after they arrive before they buy the plane ticket.
> Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies?
I'm not. Absolutely the onboarding experience can be improved.
The problem is you're losing the plot, here.
The original commenter complained about having to "read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera."
But you don't have to do that if you don't want to. If you're already willing to blindly join Reddit, you can blindly join mastodon.social.
And the app is already now driving people to do that if they really don't care (which is what the OP claims).
So this is already being improved (and yes, can absolutely be improved further).
It's 'being improved' even though it's been identified as a problem from the outset of the fediverse, nearly a decade ago. I don't know how to make this any simpler:
Forced choices drive away users. People don't like making decisions without context because they feel like scams. That's why uptake is slow almost a decade into federation. The UX model is bad.
Picking a user name is a forced choice. By your logic, nobody would ever want to join a social media platform that didn't automatically assign a user name.
> pick a large, popular instance and be done with it
.world is having technical issues. (I could sign up. But first login spawns an infinite spinny. The only reason I know that's one of the larger servers is because of this thread.)
I'm doing it. But it's tedious, and the hacker in me sees an opening for a competitor to scoop out the 90% of users who don't care about federation, they just want it to work.
> you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier
The problem is that there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit.
> there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit
It will end up like Reddit. But right now it isn't, and that's good enough to make a play for the users. Given a choice between that and choosing a server, signing up, finding its log-in unresponsive, looking for another server, signing up... (I haven't gotten further than this) who do you think wins?
By the way, we agree. I want a federated system to work. But simple sign-up fuck-ups, where even someone who's curious for curiosity's sake has to spend half an hour figuring out which servers even work at the moment,
I think we do largely agree here. However, I think it should be noted that the current migration is largely driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of users that don't really care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive opportunity.
I think that you're right in that the sign up UX is not great - there are also serious performance concerns, and in many ways the platform isn't ready yet. But I don't think that's going to persist for too long. I think some kind of "I don't care" instance (probably lemmy.world) will emerge, and the UX will improve. Perhaps it won't be in time, though.
> current migration is largely driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of users that don't really care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive opportunity
Power users' power is users. We've frequently seen the celebs-first gambit by new social media entrants, most notably Clubhouse, and while it can generate hype for a bit, it's far from a proven strategy. It's frustrating to watch a re-play of Mastodon's fumbles, particularly since this time the protest is actually semi-organized.
By power users, I'm referring to the small minority that generated the vast majority of content on Reddit. It's true that it isn't a proven strategy, but given that the Lemmy ecosystem has gotten around 100k users in the past 2-3 days, it's not failing as bad as it could be.
You say this as if it has not already proven to be a barrier. That is to say: it's already preventing adoption, whether you think it's a good reason or not.
You don't take an aeronautics course when you buy a plane ticket, because 99% of people don't want to do that. I've been a nerd for ~40 years, I used to live on Usenet, I understand federation inside out, and I don't want to learn another protocol just to try a new website.
Blindly clicking through a ToS while chuckling that 'nobody reads that shit lol' is in fact a better user experience for almost everyone. If your approach were so great, there would be physical cities whose population consisted entirely of architects and engineers.
>there would be physical cities whose population consisted entirely of architects and engineers.
the analog to a digital federation in the physical world, is literally just that, an actual federation. People making choices about what community they participate in isn't technical, it's social. Everyone who lives in a democratic society does in fact participate in how their city is run and governed or understands how to move from one state to another.
You do not need to understand the technical details of federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them. This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet. We ask it from people in the real world, so we can do it online. Why are we pretending the online version of some 19th century company town is inevitable?
> You do not need to understand the technical details of federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them.
Not only is it infantilizing, it's wrong.
People create communities online all the time. Whether it's Facebook groups or subreddits or Discourse forums or Discord groups and on and on and on. That's literally how the internet has always worked.
That's a good point. With those examples though I think being a member of multiple communities and discovering, joining, and leaving communities as desired is much lower friction compared to fediverse servers.
What you're missing is that there's no rhyme or reason tot he way the communities are presented when someone tries to join the fediverse, what the different standards are, how they're ordered, and so on. Of course we know that it's not a very important choice because people can just switch to a different server later, but to the average user it feels like they're having to lock themselves into something as a condition of participation, without any real idea of what they're getting into.
Going back to the Reddit example, it's easy to browse Reddit for [whatever]; when a person decides to create and account, they become part of the u/* supercommunity, and from there can start posting/voting in the particular subreddits that interest them. The fediverse does this backwards, equivalent to making people choose a default subreddit as a condition of becoming a user. It forces people to pick a home community which will shape their whole experience of the fediverse and how they will be perceived by other members of the fediverse before they have a chance to explore the system in a noncommital way.
it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them
It takes time for people to figure out what communities they want to inhabit within a new protocol, which is why the perception of locking them into a single originating community is an antipattern. People don't necessarily want to be judged by their originating instance, because it reduces them to a one-dimensional caricature of themselves. You could join a general-purpose instance, but there are multiple general-purpose isntances, what makes one better that or differnt from another? There's no way to tell.
Critics of the fediverse model have been pointing out this rather obvious stumbling block since it was established, and fediverse stans just keep sticking their fingers in their ears going 'la la la can't hear you.'
This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet.
It has nothing to do wish consumption vs citizenship. You're demanding people tie themselves to a point of origin as a condition of existing in the fediverse, which is one of the worst aspects of meatspace. If you join a general server and then start participating in some niche topic (idk, fursuits), people in the niche instance are likely to write you off as a tourist. Conversely, if you decide to join a furry instance but then participate in discussions about sports, a lot of your interactions are going to consist of 'go away, furry weirdo'. You could create multiple acconts for your different interests, but now you have the headache of maintaining multiple accounts.
There just isn't a good reason to lock people into a particular instance in order to sign up. It's just reproducing nationality, a concept that many of us would like to dispense with altogether.
