cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/56496251
I’d like to add to suggest a couple of things regarding Mastodon and user onboarding/retention.
The Server Selection ProblemTM
The single biggest problem with Mastodon adoption is the fact people see talk about a server and give up. As such, servers need to be removed from the conversation and onboarding process. A server still needs to be selected for a new user, however, which raises the question: How should we select a server for a new user?
The obvious solution is to simply direct users to mastodon.social, which is actually what Mastodon already does to a certain extent. The issue with this is that the Fediverse is meant to be decentralized. As such, it’s counterproductive to funnel people towards a single server. This causes maintenance bottlenecks and privacy/data-protection concerns.
As such, there needs to be some sort of method that ranks servers based on a few factors in order to select the optimal server for any given user, while keeping the decentralized nature of the Fediverse in mind.
Why any server?
First, it’s important to answer the question of why would any given user pick any given server.
Generally speaking, the server isn’t a big deal, as in, any server allows users to interact with the whole of the network in its full capacity.
All servers are Mastodon, after all.
However, there are differences. The most significant ones are, I’d say: location, uptime, and language.
A user benefits from being registered to a server that’s geographically close to them, as that leads to a better connection. Additionally, servers with high uptime and stability are preferred, as users may have different times they use the server and nobody likes to try and access a server and see that it’s down for any number of reasons. Finally, users need to be able to understand the language the server is in (obviously).
I believe these three factors should be at the forefront of the decision-making process for deciding what server to be suggested to any given user on sign-up.
Auto-selector
With that, comes the solution: a server auto-selector. A game I play, DCSS, actually does something similar for online play.
(I have my location turned off and there are very few servers, as you can see, so listing them is trivial.)
This isn’t exactly a novel scientific breakthrough, but I think it’s a significant notion for helping the onboarding process for new Mastodon users.
A server auto-selector should filter servers to suggest by following these steps:
- Detect the user’s system language.
- Detect the user’s location.
- Calculate the server’s uptime score.
- Pseudo-rank user-count.
I believe the first two points are self-explanatory. Being that Mastodon (and the Fediverse, in general) stands firmly against data-harvesting, location data should probably not be mandatorily collected. It should be easy to either ask the user for some vague information or simply allow them to skip this step entirely, even if it might affect the user experience. Additionally, there’s the issue that many servers don’t make it known where they’re hosted. Ideally, this could change to facilitate server selection for the users, but there’s always the point that, if a server doesn’t say where it’s hosted, it gets pulled down by the algorithm, which in turn encourages divulging that kind of information; this might a problem solved by the solution, if you get my meaning.
What I mean by uptime score is simply an evaluation of the server’s uptime history. For example, it’s not good policy to direct users towards servers that are often unavailable, it might be disadvantageous to direct users to servers with too-frequent downtime for maintenance, and so on. As such, the server auto-selector should calculate a sort of “score” for any server that fits the first two points. I can’t say how this should be calculated, exactly, but I’m sure some computer-knowers out there can come up with a less-than-terrible methodology for this.
The last point is something that I think should be taken into account as well, regarding the user-count of the servers. As I mentioned, we can’t funnel users towards a single server, but another issue is that we should actually encourage user dispersion over many servers. The outlined method might already do this to a sufficient extent, but I suggest doing some sort of randomization of filtered servers based on user-count. I think it’s wrong to simply plug a new user into the least-populated server around, but I do think that over-populated servers, in a relative sense, should be discouraged by the server-selector.
Worst case scenario, a random server that passes the uptime score point can be selected for any new user.
The onboarding experience
Basically, this should be as simple as possible. The more questions need to be answered, the worse.
I think a simple “Join Mastodon” button is the best. Just a big blue button in the middle of the homepage.
Server selection should start as soon as the new user accesses the joinmastodon website, and clicking the button simply redirects the user to the sign-up process for that server.
I believe this approach would increase adoption of Mastodon by streamlining the server selection process, as well as help the continuous decentralization of the Fediverse.
The Feed Problem
Another significant issue with Mastodon is the feed and community/discovery aspects.
Creating a new Mastodon account yields… Nothing. An empty feed!
This is absolutely terrible and ruins user retention. I’ve had several people tell me that this first-experience emptiness completely turned them off from Mastodon. It’s not intuitive, and it needs to be corrected.
A simple solution
Mastodon does have feeds, but they’re all tucked away in the Explore and Live Feeds tabs.
I think the single biggest change that Mastodon can make, as far as this goes, is to shift the Explore->Posts feed to the Home tab. Just do it like Twitter or Bluesky, make the discovery feed the first thing a new user encounters.
That, by itself, should make a difference in terms of user retention.
Maybe I’m delusional and severely underestimating how doable this is, but I really believe Mastodon needs to change the way it deals with new users if we want it to actually grow into a strong social media, keyword social (it needs people).
Thoughts?
Let them download an app and throw them into discovery or new at first (+ tell them to follow people who post fun stuff or something) Or look for a different frontend But it feels like the best strat is to throw them in and explain how it works later
Just a reminder: if the intent is to get people off bluesky, xitter or threads, the masses won’t care about servers, they’ll only care about whether “people are there”.
Maybe I’m delusional and severely underestimating how doable this is, but I really believe Mastodon needs to change the way it deals with new users if we want it to actually grow into a strong social media, keyword social (it needs people).
The irony is that each server, as they’re running their own version of mastodon (or similar federated program), could edit their code to make the change so that the first page a new user sees is the local or global posts coming in. I don’t know how many bother to add any bit of code that differs from the main source, but I suspect it’s a very small fraction, which means the real decision falls on the main mastodon maintainers who, if comments on previous mastodon focused posts are anything to go by, very rarely accept changes to UI/UX
if comments on previous mastodon focused posts are anything to go by, very rarely accept changes to UI/UX
Yikes…
Can I just say that personally I don’t know anyone who wants to publicly microblog. Like that’s just such a niche type of social media. People want to participate in threads like Reddit, or post to friends like Instagram or facebook, but only celebrities and public figures want to microblog.
That went hard from “people I know” to people, period. I’m decidedly non-celebrity, but I use Mastodon as well as
LemmyMbin 🤷You’d have to live under a rock (or not bother looking up publicly available stats) to claim that your experience reflects general usage.
I mean publicly available stats of 11million users somehow proves your point? Facebook has 3 billion users. X has 600 million but over half are bots. 1 in 5 of those accounts are American. So that’s about 1/5th of the people in America have a twitter account. How much they post would be much more complicated stat.
Here it is being ranked 12th most popular social media.
https://backlinko.com/twitter-users#most-popular-networking-service
So yeah, I’m glad we are now focusing on emulating actually popular social media like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. We can have an X clone but why did we start with one?
Just the sheer percentages of Software User Distribution by MAU on FediDb contradict your assertions about what “people” focus on.
Currently, Lemmy is at 3.05% vs Mastodon 56.85%.
All of those other platforms you try to throw into the discussion are beside the point. Nice try though.
That’s merely an anchoring effect. Mastadon was the first of those technologies, and activitypub itself was heavily inspired by replicating Twitter so it was also the most straightforward implementation. Lastly, a lot of the far more favorited social media platforms rely on either strong content creators or social network effects to succeed, whereas Twitter creates enough bubbles and is less focused on people you actually know IRL that it doesn’t suffer as much from this problem.
You don’t understand correlation and causation apparently, just pointing at stats and grunting without reasoning about them. The effective number of people using fediverse platforms being almost inverse of the number of people using non fediverse platform corollaries shows if anything that fediverse itself is facing an adoption problem, not that Twitter is the best platform for it to emulate.
This is fair, but I think misguided.
Twitter is huge. Regardless of whether it’s huge because of celebrities or because randos like to post is, in my opinion, mostly irrelevant. I rarely post on there, but I do browse it quite often because it’s an easy way to keep up with a bunch of things I’m interested in. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Many extremely popular memes also come from Twitter, which I think highlights how big of a cultural hub it is.
Then again, maybe you’re right and this sort of social media isn’t very good. Genuinely, I don’t know.
For the record, though, I also think selecting servers automatically should be a Lemmy feature.
I actually think that too. But unfortunately, Mastodon is the only project outside the Fediverse that has been reported on by high-reach media. As a result, universities and the scientific community are now very fixated on Mastodon, without knowing that there are more alternatives in the Fediverse that might have been more suitable for them.
After all, before choosing a server, the first crucial step is to choose the software/service that can be used to access the Fediverse. But even that was repeatedly presented as ‘too complicated’, so that almost everyone was directed to Mastodon.
The questions that were skipped during onboarding are then asked later by almost everyone and have to be answered individually for everyone.
I think changing the verbiage from “server” to “village” or “herd” or “neighborhood,” or just something more familiar to the non-techie, combined with your proposal of displaying a full welcome feed of suggested material would go a long way to improving retention and marketability. Other fediverse portals can learn this lesson too.
Fair point, language does make a big difference. I’m not one to come up with the best word for it, though…
Other fediverse portals can learn this lesson too.
Definitely. I originally made this post about Lemmy as well, actually, but I decided to keep it focused on Mastodon.
