Full disclosure, this idea is for a Lemmy client I’ve been toying around with making. I’ve gotten a bit in my head and would to run an idea by everyone.

The challenge:

Onboard people onto Lemmy in a way that makes sense to people that understands Fediverse and explains it well enough that typical social media users will understand it too

My onboarding flow idea.

As you read this, think of CARROT weather, an app with a funny personality.

You are an alien creature exploring the Lemmy Verse, a federation of social planets. You must chose a home planet, then you are free to explore its local communities or any of the communities in the lemmy federation of planets

I might give the alien creature a name. TBD.

Is this stupid?

Remaining challenges:

I suspect a guiding the user to select the same “home planet” if they log out could be an issue.
Should I explain that not all planets live in the same Federation? I’m thinking no.

Would love to reinforce this with animations that really drive the idea home. Almost like cut scenes from a video game. But that is beyond my area of expertise, for now.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I honestly don't like default instance approach. I think people should be able to select tags and they'd get communities recommended with maybe a flag of the country where it comes from next to it and like just a list of blocked communities from that home (inaccesible planets) and like a short description. I don't think lemmy should become as centralised. I like your idea for that approach. If one community shuts down or like the admins or mods act stupid it would suck for users to not have been given a choice.

[–] gedaliyah 1 points 4 days ago

A default instance is not ideal, but adding a barrier to joining is counterproductive. If someone has an interest in a specific area, they should be directed to join programming.dev or slrpnk.net etc. If they want a general purpose instance, then they should just be assigned a default.

Personally, I started the signup multiple times because there are hundreds of servers and if you haven't already used the platform it's impossible to know what you need.

Anyway, more than promoting Lemmy as a platform, we should be promoting Lemmy content. Mostly it is publicly visible without an account, and if someone sees Lemmy links 5-10 times, they may start wondering what they are missing out on.

[–] moseschrute 1 points 5 days ago

That’s what I was thinking! But I’m not sure that is better than just randomizing the default instance. Randomizing would have almost the same effect with much less user friction.