I’ve seen from a lot of people that the biggest gripe with getting started is trying to figure out which instance to sign up with. I’d like to try and make that much less of an issue with a simple user-onboarding process.
What I’m thinking is presenting a user with a normal sign up screen, like you would see elsewhere, but with a dropdown that allows the user to select an instance from a list of options. Optionally, an “advanced” user could supply their own instance. The default list of instances would preferably be decent sized, trusted instances, but would also hopefully get users to stop trying to register on one of a small handful of instances and causing poor performance for those instances.
What ideas do you have?
We need a one-line explanation (I cannot find words to distill this), demonstrating that instance selection is entirely arbitrary - users need to not only believe it, but understand it intuitively, and quickly. And it’s not intuitive to most persons’ Web experience (With every internet decision I have made since IRC, the domain at which I hoist my flag, has defined the content available to me. Why would I register with an instance that hosts only thirty users? Don’t I want to be where the other people are? Hang on, if the choice is arbitrary, why am I presented with a choice at all? Surely I’m missing something. No, I don’t understand this, and so just in case, I should put myself where the other people are. If it wasn’t better over there, they wouldn’t all be there. Hang on, how do I hop between instances seamlessly? Why are there instances? What even is an instance? Why am I here? Who am I?)
Just address those concerns in ten words or less, and problem solved! XD (I may or may not have had the same questions)
It’s a difficult challenge.
The common refrain about the fediverse is “don’t over think it! You can engage with communities across instances!”
But the truth is the instance you choose does matter to the experience you’ll have. The most obvious thing to consider is what other instances is it federated with and what is it’s reputation? Who you are able to engage with on the fediverse is directly related to your instance.
Second, one of the primary feeds you’ll see is the “local” posts. It’s the default as far as I can tell. For non technical users, that will be the default experience.
So choosing an instance is, for me, a question of what you do and don’t want to see, fundamentally.
The catch-22 is that for those who aren’t power users, you really want to have them onboard to an active instance, which implies a minimum size. But that then makes it more difficult to bootstrap a new instance.
Finally, it would be interesting to have a Split View of what “all” looks like on the instance you choose, and what “all” looks like on the instances it is de federated from.
I think the biggest thing that will help users is to have some sorta way that log ins are persistent across different instances
