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.
In theory, I agree with you! A 100%, but the problem is that currently Lemmy doesn't support migrating your profile to a different server. So that already slightly complicates things. So from the get-go they are forced to make choice. A choice which isn't clear, what potential consequences are and the fact they currently easily migrate to a different server, obviously doesn't help.
"Like email" is basically the same description I've been using to explain it to non-tech people.
Long story short, onboarding needs to get better. But that also applies for other Fediverse projects (like Mastodon or Friendica).
I'm not sure the 'like email' thing helps.
Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don't know anyone who met via email.
Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn't work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.
I'm vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.
Join the fediverse! It's as simple as setting up an email server!
In my experience it at least helps in the sense that, when people ask "why are there more then 1 site?" ? And up to a certain degree you use that to explain the concept of federating.