I was invited to comment here by u/BlazeAlt on Reddit last week regarding ways to lower the barriers to joining the Fediverse for average users — so here I go.
I’m sure a lot of this has been discussed ad nauseam, but I do have some specific starting suggestions at the end.
With corporate, single-instance social media, there’s one place you go sign up, and you’re in. You can find things that interest you with a simple search, and you can find people you know either by their names (Facebook) or by a very simple handle ([at]nickname). And if you’re trying to build up an online identity — say, for your new podcast — if you’re handle is unique enough you can end each episode with “and you can find us at MyNewPodcast on all the socials!”
Federated social media requires you to choose an instance before you can even sign up. But…
[average user voice]
- What the hell’s an “instance”?
- How do I choose one?
- Why do I have to choose one?
- What do their names mean?
- What does the instance I choose say about me? -Does choosing one over another have any effect on the experience I will have?
- How does someone on another instance find me?
- How do I find someone on another instance?
- How do I find topics on another instance? -Does my choice of instance affect my access to those topics?
- Are the rules different on each instance?
- Who sets the rules?
- Where do I find them?
- What if I want to change instances?
- Will anyone be able to find me?
- How will they know I’m still me?
[/end average user voice]
Federated social media also requires weirdly complicated handles. [average user voice]
- Why are there two @ signs?
- What does it mean if there’s a “!” instead of a “@” at the beginning?
- What the hell are all these weird domain names?
- Why can’t I be just [at]TheSameHandleIUsedOnTwitter?
- If I’m trying to create an online identity, what’s to stop someone from using [at]MyHandle[at]SomeOtherInstance.url and posing as me?
- What’s the Lemmy equivalent of a blue check?
- If there isn’t one, how can anyone be sure someone on Lemmy saying they’re me really is me? -I mean, other than starting my own instance with recognizable name — but then I have to learn how to host my own instance.
[/end average user voice]
To be clear: I’m not literally asking these questions. I’m just illustrating some of the hurdles to adoption I described above, and some of the ways in which federated social media is exponentially more complicated than corporate social media.
As for solutions, I don’t have an all-encompassing proposal at the moment. But a good place to start would be to agree upon a single default instance for new users to sign up, so that instead of being faced with “first choose an instance,” it would be…
Welcome to Lemmy.URL, where you can join Lemmy communities for any topic, all over the world! What do you want your username to be?
- [____________]
OK, do you want your username to use a common lemmy “instance,” like…
- [ ] ____________ [at] lemmy.URL
- [ ] ____________ [at] lemm.ee
- [ ] ____________ [at] etc.
OR would you like more custom username connected to a particular Lemmy community, like…
- [ ] ____________ [at] sci-fi-fans.url
- [ ] ____________[at] knittingnuts.url
- [find Lemmy instances where your username is available]
- [I know which Lemmy instance I want to join first]
Choosing a community-based username doesn’t affect how you use Lemmy — no matter what community you chose, you’ll have access to all the same content, communities, users, and feeds.
The [find Lemmy instances] button would lead to a page where you check off various areas of interest to then get a curated subset of relevant instances with a reasonable amount of information about them to help new users select one.
The [I know which instance] button would have you fill in the name of the instance, check if your username is available, then take you to that sign-up page.
So…something akin to join-lemmy.org, but with a flow closers to what I’ve described above, with very few, easy, “common” default choices, and a little more help through the process of choosing a specialized instance (if you want one).
This onboarding suggestion doesn’t solve most of the problems/questions in my bullet lists (ideas still forming), but it would help prevent what happened to me the first few times I looked into Lemmy, which was that as soon as I saw I had to choose an instance before I did anything else — with pretty much zero information on what that meant or how it would affect my use of Lemmy — I said, “I don’t have the time for this.”
BTW, as I write this, my first Lemmy post, I will also add that the comment fields need to be WYSIWYG for if Lemmy ever hopes to be populated by refugees from Reddit, etc. Creating the quote section above was a huge pain in the ass, that required multiple rounds of [Preview] [Edit] [Preview] [Edit] [Preview] [Edit] [Preview] [Edit].
Food for thought. Cheers.
The biggest mistake the fediverse as a whole made was not having a standard account object.
Their should also be universal handles. Like u should be able to do
@someusernameand that is a standard user across all federated services everyone all instances.So if we where to do fediversal account tags how would that work? What would a home instance mean? How could u trust that u don’t just have some random instance impersonating you?
Well their is a solution for this. Ik I’m going to get lots of hate for suggesting this but please just hear me out. This is the exact issue that blockchain solves. U use the blockchain as a ledger that links a username to a public key. Then any activity signed by the associated private key coming from any instance is that user. Now to address the issues that everyone is gonna bring up from their instinctive dismissal of a blockchain. U would choose the objectively best blockchain XMR due to low fees, low environmental impact, scalability, etc. This means that registering an account or changing the usernames public key would cost (as of present) $0.001. How this fee is paid is to be decided but allocating donation money to it would work (to register every single user on lemm.ee would cost about $50).
OK so what about the whole key pair thing that doesn’t sound very noob friendly. Well u just let an instance do it for you like most of the crypto exchanges do. This means that accounts would be portable across instance and even platforms.
So how does a server know where to send data so u receive it. Well u still have a “home instance” that acts the same as Activpub does now. Just maintain a federated ledger where a user can change their “home instance” verified with their signature.