I had shared an earlier version of this last week, and a draft of the updates a few days ago. Thanks to everybody for the feedback!
Here’s the key points:
- Don’t tell people “it’s easy”
- Improve the “getting-started experience”
- Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
- Prioritize accessibility
- Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
- Invest in moderation tools
- Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
- Values matter
- This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity
Yeah honestly I’ve seen so many posts with multiple paragraphs explaining federation, while I’ve just been telling my friends two sentences like “it’s just like reddit but instead of one website there’s multiple independent ones (called instances) that all see each other’s content. All content on all those instances can and should only be accessed through the website you signed up on, and when you do that it works basically completely like reddit”
This leaves out a bunch of information of course, but if they want more, they can always be confused and ask or look it up themselves.
Yeah I mean even like…at this point you can show them a screenshot of the front page of kbin/lemmy and say “hey, it looks like this. Sign up for this instance & you’ll be fine. Here’s a link to 10 magazines you should subscribe to, and here’s a link to your preferences.”
Thing is, people do, which is why…
The easiest thing to do is, obviously, send new people to large sites that already have all of the remote communities people want access to subscribed to. Those work super well for people who need federation to be mostly hidden from them. But there’s are practical caps on how big any one instance can get, which necessitates horizontal expansion of the network. Newer or smaller instances aren’t going to have as complete federation, and that makes them less than ideal as a place for new users to go.
We need admins who are spinning up new instances to be conscious of this. People making niche instances need to have alts on mainstream instances to initiate federation. People making general purpose sites need to make sure they’re seeding their server with all of the communities people want to join. Expansion needs to be done consciously and contentiously to make the distributed nature of things not matter.
“Fediverse: an open source Reddit-like cluster. An instance is a node.” … heh, as I read that, it probably makes things more confusing.