Personally I thought first impressions of Mastodon (and Lemmy) were abysmal. Being told to pick a server without knowing what that means or the consequences of that choice just scares people away. Unless someone has a specific server in mind they should not even be asked to pick one. Instead a number of existing servers should volunteer as curated core servers and new users are automatically assigned to one of those. There can still be a "let me choose" link that goes to a full list of servers if they prefer to browse them all

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Pick randomly fir a new user, and make it possible to migrate later.

[–] domportera@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think this is a decent take. Maybe certain trusted servers can opt to be "default" servers and new users signing up on mastodon's default homepage are round-robbin'd into them. This can create a large burden of moderation on servers that opt into this, but it would be well worth it to turn mastodon into a user-friendly platform

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds like a good way. I have to admit, signing up for mastodon was a confusing mindfuck, and I'm not anything close to tech-illiterate as a reporter, and it's mainly because of the process. It's seriously crippled adoption.

[–] domportera@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

people -> create content -> engages (including share) -> bring people -> create

same! I'm super tech-literate and I had real trouble choosing a server. and before that I had trouble understanding exactly what it meant (though the email analogy goes a long way). And of course I ended up regretting the server I chose and am in the process of migrating 😓

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago

It's apparently easy to migrate between mastodon instances, it's an option under the Settings page, so they already got that covered.

[–] Beardedobject@pathfinder.social 4 points 1 year ago

After installing both of those I ended up setting them aside for a few days because of this. I'm glad I made time to work it out but yeah, Installing and signing up are not the issues.