this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it's "federated" or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it's built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is "Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform". Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don't). Then there are screen shots of code diff's and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see 'mod tools', and then at the end back to self hosting "With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated". None of this is enticing people in. It's turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That's what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they're in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a "benefits" link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It's federated... You know... Like email. Well I've used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
I get the sentiment, but who is going to do it? just as the developers are donating their time, there will need to be community minded folks doing the same.
Lemmy doesn't have a marketing budget to spend on a community manager.
There are a couple issues open on join-lemmy's github - https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues, but not a lot in the way of contributing to fix it.
I mean, I get for a lot of people it's not user friendly, but ultimately Lemmy is not some start up that has to grab a market share quick. If no one contributes better documentation, perhaps there won't be a high enough adoption rate, but that's ok for Lemmy.