Full disclosure, this idea is for a Lemmy client I’ve been toying around with making. I’ve gotten a bit in my head and would to run an idea by everyone.

The challenge:

Onboard people onto Lemmy in a way that makes sense to people that understands Fediverse and explains it well enough that typical social media users will understand it too

My onboarding flow idea.

As you read this, think of CARROT weather, an app with a funny personality.

You are an alien creature exploring the Lemmy Verse, a federation of social planets. You must chose a home planet, then you are free to explore its local communities or any of the communities in the lemmy federation of planets

I might give the alien creature a name. TBD.

Is this stupid?

Remaining challenges:

I suspect a guiding the user to select the same “home planet” if they log out could be an issue.
Should I explain that not all planets live in the same Federation? I’m thinking no.

Would love to reinforce this with animations that really drive the idea home. Almost like cut scenes from a video game. But that is beyond my area of expertise, for now.

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[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 20 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I like it but I really think we spend too much time explaining the home instance. We should put a lot less emphasis on it because it's stressful to people. Just invite them to join your home instance and they can change in the future if they want.

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

Very much agree with this, I think people really overcomplicate it.

"It's like reddit, but community build and community run."

And they you can just invite them to your instance

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Remember this is an onboarding flow for an app. It has to capture the user and explain things well without losing their attention.

What I want to avoid is “hey, select an instance from this menu”. “Wtf is an instance?”

Voyager gets around this by defaulting to an instance (lemmy.ee I think) before you log in, but my plan was to have them select when they launch the app for the first time.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

What I want to avoid is “hey, select an instance from this menu”. “Wtf is an instance?”

Indeed, so just give them a link to an instance. Nowadays I give

https://discuss.online/ if you're American

https://sopuli.xyz/ if you're European

https://vger.app/ if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions

https://reddit.com/comments/1hmf2uy/comment/m4odk1u

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Picking a default instance seems like the right approach.