If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can’t be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don’t know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won’t work.
My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: “Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net/. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances.”
For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.
Indeed, I see people saying “we should just randomly assign an instance from the top 10”, when hexbear (RIP) was in the top 5
Also top 10 ( https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list )
I made a more complete analysis in this post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37336391 (pinned on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com ), nowadays I basically go with:
" Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions"
Because yes, the USA/EU question appeared during the Luigi announcement in LW.
If new users were asked to pick 3 or more topics from the top 10, then the most relevant instance could be assigned
join-lemmy.org tried that approach, the experience is subpar: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536
Rest In Perdition
What happened to hexbear? I mean, I blocked the whole instance so I didn’t have to read their crap any more, but did it disappear?