this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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First post on Lemmy, would love to share a few thoughts with you all :)
At a basic level, I believe the cycle of a social network has this basic structure:
people -> create content -> engages (including share) -> bring people -> create content -> etc
IMO the main reason behind the success of Twitter or Reddit is the width and depth of the content they have: if you login now it's extremely easy to find content about virtually anything you might want. This provides an immediate benefit to the new user, who's motivated to stay, learn the platform and eventually engage with it.
Behind the content, there are people. The other magic of social networking is that the users, basically, become the creators / curators of the content themselves. It seems so obvious when we think about it, and has powerful networking effects, one of which is the engagement between users.
This is what makes the step of "user onboarding" critical for the life of a social network, and reducing it to "people that are tech illiterate don't belong to the fediverse" is a dangerous and counterproductive argument for the health of the system (and a narrative that I think we, as the "early adopters", should try to avoid as much as possible).
I believe that the success of the fediverse (as a system / protocol, not just as a social network) depends on having width and depth in its communities to avoid collapsing into a "walled garden approach" - and this depends in large part in the contribution of people with many interests and experiences, in order to "build the content" over time - regardless of the instance / server.
A few examples of topics that I loved to follow on Reddit where the user base is not "traditionally techie", but worked really hard to produce excellent content:
Because of this, and because I'd love to see project like Lemmy succeed over time, I think that improving the User Experience is the real priority for us as a community to build and strengthen the fediverse.
There's a lot of UX best practices that could be lifted by best-in-class apps and services so we don't have to start from zero and I don't think there would be any real downsides - but I'd love to hear from others as well on what they think :)