I read something recently that gave me food for thought. An alternative has to be 10x better for people to switch; and the core experience is what convinces people, not cool extra features.
I don't know how universally applicable it is, but I wonder how Mastodon stacks up in that. Personally I think it's 10x better, but is it really? Or more importantly, are we communicating clearly that it is?
@Gargron I think instance selection is a huge roadblock.
Keep laughing, but: dynamically generated instances as a default sign up, including a dynamically generated cute name and logo. Once the person count hits Dunbar's number, a new instance automatically spins up.
Pooling new people together gives them the opportunity to meet each other and create their own culture.
Of course this would just be a default option for someone who doesn't already have a specific instance in mind.
@mhu2141ai @Gargron yes, centralization is a point of concern. Maybe the new auto-generated instances could expire and force people elsewhere after a time limit.
My concern is that the onboarding process is simply too arduous for all but elite or highly motivated people.
@kai I apologize for the tone -- it's just that things looking to maximize user count / "engagement" have been universally terrible IME and selecting for people who make a baseline effort helps. If people aren't thinking about who moderates their instance, their experience will probably end up suffering for it anyway, and -everyone- loses if you have a flood of people who don't know wtf they're doing
@mhu2141ai no need to apologize; I'm no social media philosopher or anything.
I just remember a reddit april fools' day where you got placed in a chatroom with one other person and then the rooms got joined so it was 4 people and that kept happening and you could vote when to stop growing the community. It was really interesting. I think a similar experiment would be interesting with activitypub.
@kai Yeah, as an experiment and not a general purpose feature that sounds fun
@mhu2141ai it solves other onboarding problems though ๐
@kai I'll reiterate: anyone who can't spend 10-15 minutes selecting an instance deserves 0 onboarding, and onboarding them would likely be a detriment
@elomatreb @kai I really do not think this is half as difficult as you're making it
@elomatreb @mhu2141ai @kai for me personally it was very easy.
I signed up for m.s and once i stayed too long there I knew that I need to move unto a smaller instance.
I chose chaos.social because lots of cool nerds were there. You need to use Mastodon in order to get a sense of what each instance is about. What sort of people come from the instance and what is discussed there.
@saxnot @elomatreb @mhu2141ai @kai Yes, this was pretty much how it went down for me too....
So having a landing instance you can fully migrate from could be a solution. I don't fully recall the timing but it took about a month before I found the instance I wanted to stick with... and I was a technical, fully motivated user. Something most aren't.
I think you need to find simple ways/features for people to locate people with similar interests.
@shellkr @elomatreb @mhu2141ai @kai i wish there were more book enthusiast instances.
There is this one instance that brands itself as Goodreads Alternative but tbh I think they're more interested in building a parallal universe alltogether.