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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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

The Fediverse is a bunch of pirate and free trade ships that pass messages around with one another.

Pick a ship and let's get going!

Then show a list of the top instances. e.g. lemm.ee has the maximum amount of content, but at the cost of including all known trolling instances - Alt-Right, Alt-Left, and otherwise. lemmynsfw.com for, you know, porn, but many people block it as a result. Themed instances for Star Trek, Star Wars, anarchy, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, computer programming, gaming, anime, climate change, general science, etc. Or location based like aussie.zone for Australia, lemmy.ca for Canada, feddit.org for Germany, feddit.uk for UK, jlai.lu for France, Discuss.Online for USA, etc.

Sorting the list at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list can help. Unfortunately it requires 2 clicks after following that link to see what I mean, as the URL won't provide a sort ordering.

For the examples given, you could make links that show the feed sorted by Local and Active, to show what kind of content is most readily accessible there - e.g. this link, and therefore would have the least amount of federation (message passing) issues especially delays.

For the most part I would avoid instances having only a single admin as there can be problems with that, like them not responding quickly to a request to make a new account, or in the worst case what happened with Ernst at Kbin.social or dmv.social or so on where when the single person called it quits then the entire instance disappeared.

Which boat you choose can have a MASSIVE difference in how you experience the Fediverse - e.g. check out how different lemmy.ml looks from Lemmy.ca - bc of how many people will straight up block your entire instance (e.g. I have blocked all users from Lemmy.ml, bc I don't enjoy those type of tankie/Alt-Left messages in my feed).

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago

Beautiful! 😍

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

After all the other comments I was thinking randomly auto select one of the instances that meets certain criteria, but you make a good argument. Giving people choice over their server was what I was initially thinking when I came up with this planet analogy.