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.
Spot on. Focusing on the software is the most tech-centered approach one can do, unfortunately tech people suck at make something excellent for non-tech people.
People don’t like it but we need to put more focus on the fediverse as a network, say the AP word exactly once as to not confuse, but always operate in that state of mind.
And tech people must build a web extension to do fediverse stuff while being somewhere on the web ! That’s what a User Agent is for, doing stuff for me