or another way to ask it, what made fedi easier for you to adopt? I don’t think the answer is better ways of explaining how federation exactly works, because no matter how good of an analogy you can make, most users don’t care and just want to know how to get started
EDIT: I guess I’ll go first, for something like Mastodon I think encouraging people to use a client like pinafore.social or Tusky instead of going directly to the website of the instance would help stop people from confusing themselves by getting redirected between instances. Same for Lemmy as better clients start to pop up
It took me trying five different sites to join. Two asked for an essay, and neither have responded a day later. This is not tenable.
I’m a dev, and from the statistics I’ve gathered form abandonment is the largest factor towards failure to take an action. Having a form fail, having to “apply”, or having a failure message makes people leave. We have to fix this problem to allow for better adoption.
There needs to be some sort of central system to join. A site whose sole existence is to house an app with four inputs, and a button. Username, password, confirm password, email, and sign up. After this it should take a list of sites that volunteer to take users, and randomly place them into one. If it fails, or takes too long, it should try another. It should then inform them of the site, email them, and finally redirect them to the site logged in.
This would be difficult to implement as it requires these sites to allow third party sign ups but this would solve the form abandonment problem. Allowing this would also allow for apps to do the same.