this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it's "federated" or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it's built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is "Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform". Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don't). Then there are screen shots of code diff's and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see 'mod tools', and then at the end back to self hosting "With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated". None of this is enticing people in. It's turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That's what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they're in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a "benefits" link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It's federated... You know... Like email. Well I've used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
I agree for the most part and that the front page should be more focused on what the user will gain or be able to do if they join and in language that understand. However, the first sentence is "Follow communities anywhere in the world" not bad at least. It should elaborate on what that means.
Some people of course really do care about FOSS and letting people know that or even just having them see those words/ideas is important IMHO. It could, however, elaborate by saying "social media that is not corporate controlled" or whatever that may make the point about it more clear.