A new onboarding experience on Mastodon
blog.joinmastodon.org
Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge.

I’ve seen lots of discussion on reddit of users trying to get others to join Lemmy and the prevailing reply is that it is too difficult to navigate and comprehend. Having to answer multiple questions and wait for manual verification is combersome and is limiting growth at a time when nothing should be standing in Lemmy’s way. Combine this with server/instance selection analysis paralysis, and you get my point.

The linked mastodon blog post sums up my thoughts, but the TLDR is essentially this:

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don’t let dreams of decentralization interfere with the greater goal of achieving the network effect.

We should all be telling people to go to lemmy.ml and sign up. The devs should be too, and they should rethink/remove the questions and waiting period. Hell, just put a captcha. Discussions about servers and analogies to email as an example of federated service we all already use is a waste of breath. We shouldn’t have barriers to entry.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I’ve just found kbin.social and find it has superior signup options. It’s just: make an account (email/password), or sign up with Google or Apple. No server talk. Upside is the layout is nice and it acts as a Lemmy instance (threads) as well as a mastodon instance (microblogging). Only downside currently is that their android/iOS app is in development and isn’t ready yet, so desktop only.

https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin

https://kbin.social/

I think this might be the better recommendation for newbies at the moment.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•11 months ago

    I think the way Mastodon is handling new users is pretty problematic. Not only did this lead to huge amounts of spam on the network because Eugen’s instance couldn’t handle the amount of new users, but also this goes against the very idea of federation.

    Unpopular opinion: if finding an instance is too hard for you, maybe the federated internet just isn’t for you. I see people on reddit still complaining about how difficult Mastodon is, and I’m sorry but if that’s too complicated for you, just stay on reddit. Considering the level of discourse of both sites, I think it’s a feature, not a bug.

    • JoshuaEnglish
      26•11 months ago

      Unpopular opinion: if finding an instance is too hard for you, maybe the federated internet just isn’t for you.

      I don’t really agree with that take. With an attitude like that, Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc will never take off. You’ll always be here screaming into the void because no one else will be around to chat.

      Without making the on-boarding easier, Reddit, Meta, and Twitter will continue to screw everyone over.

      There’s nothing wrong with throwing someone in an instance to get them used to everything, especially when you are able to move your entire account to a different instance easily. It’s not like you’re locked down to the instance you were originally placed in.

      I mean shit, I understand instances, but I gave up the first time I tried to join Mastodon because I was too lazy to sign up for an instance in my browser, and then copy the details into the app. Wasn’t the lack of knowing, it was the multistep process that felt like a waste of time.

      • @[email protected]English
        12•11 months ago

        Didn’t seem so hard to me. Pick an instance, fill out the sign-up form, click a link in an email, and that’s that. It was actually significantly easier than usual because it didn’t require me to spend an hour reading legalese.

        Onboarding Lemmy wasn’t awful either, but the “why do you want to be here” question was rather intimidating, as if to say I’m not welcome here until I prove my worth. The last thing we should do is give people the impression this is an exclusive club. We’re trying to filter out toxic people, not shy or humble people.

        Note that I onboarded using my desktop. If there are any issues with onboarding on a phone, I wouldn’t know.

      • @[email protected]English
        7•11 months ago

        Yeah you’re probably right. It’s also not very healthy to have a barrier like this around a community. You wouldn’t want just the tech savvy users on your site – there’s lots of interesting people who don’t know or care too much about computers.

        Still, I’m happy Mastodon hasn’t yet been overrun by the masses like Twitter. shudders