This is a symptom of the problem, I think. The idea of a social media platform being confusing enough to even need a new user guide will be enough to put people off.

I think the conversation needs to be framed differently. Most new users aren’t going to care about federation or decentralization when they first look at the platform. Don’t tell people to choose an instance, just recommend one that you think is good. At that point, the only thing that will draw people in is to see interesting conversations and communities when they visit.

To me, that means feeds that aren’t dominated by niche interests by default. Don’t get me wrong, I love Star Trek and I appreciate Linux for what it’s good at. But if I wasn’t into those things, I would think those are the only communities being represented here.

In that respect, the sorting algorithm needs work. The votes are a good way to start, but it’s become pretty clear that in the new user feed, some communities need to be weighted differently than others. The initial experience should probably show more actual conversations, and fewer communities that live off bot posts.

People were really excited about being able to make bots that repost entire rss feeds or repost other site content into everyone’s Lemmy front page, and those are fun projects to work on. But those need to have a lot smaller impact on the default feed that instances show