fediverse, beginner's guide
Decided to have a shot at writing a very concise guide to the fediverse, because a lot of the guides are quite long: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/f924e846c24ec7ed82d6d554a7e7c9a8
Hope this is helpful to someone!
fediverse, beginner's guide
@joepie91 a) cool b) after talking with multiple folks who have bounced off of masto, I strongly disagree with your assertion that it doesn't matter what server you start with.
I think folks _need_ to find one that looks like it has "their people" on it. Otherwise they're going to either not see content / people they're interested in, or find content that they actively dislike.
👍 emphasizing "you can move", & "don't worry" aspect BUT...
fediverse, beginner's guide
@joepie91 If we want folks to find a happy home here, and tell their friends, it's important that they see content that makes them feel like it's worth sticking around for.
The "choose an instance" is a HUGE onboarding hurdle, but the difference between a good choice and a random one is the difference between staying and bouncing.
fediverse, beginner's guide
@masukomi It's a tricky one. My hope in linking to joinmastodon (with its categories) is that it'll get people close enough to a community they care about, without spending much energy on picking a precise instance - and that they'll "graduate" to a more exact choice later on.
I honestly just don't know whether that'll work, but I've seen *a lot* of people bounce off on analysis paralysis, so provisionally I'm ranking "easy choice" slightly higher in importance than "accurate choice"...
fediverse, beginner's guide
@joepie91 yeah. The initial “analysis paralysis” is probably a bigger problem than the “good instance” but i think only barely so.
It’s just… not good. I love Mastodon. But that initial choice is just such a huge roadblock. An invite to a friends instance is bad too because then the larger instances end up with an exponentially larger burden (CPU & $$).
Doesn’t help that Mastodon scales radically worse than Pleroma, and admins can’t switch server tech seamlessly