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the landing page seems dope, but then clicking through to joining is very confusing. What exactly is a user supposed to do? Do I need to run one of these node

the landing page seems dope, but then clicking through to joining is very confusing. What exactly is a user supposed to do? Do I need to run one of these nodes? any plan to improve the onboarding experience, or do we plan on just letting this die?

zdunn 7y ago
Yea pixelfed has always been bad at onboarding. It's been brought up before but nothing has improved except making a pretty landing page. On instances where registration is closed, the only thing you see is a message telling you that and external links.
r3bl 7y ago
Your user experience will be the same regardless of which node you choose, since you can follow people regardless of what node they're using. Every user account is constructed as @user@pixelfed.tld. But, yeah, onboarding is a rough problem to solve when your goal isn't for one server to contain all the data. It requires learning some new stuff that I couldn't be bothered to learn for far too long. If privacy-conscious people aren't willing to learn them, nobody will and these projects will just die.
- cynix 7y ago
  > Your user experience will be the same regardless of which node you choose How do I know or find out who owns/runs the node I choose? Surely some nodes are more stable than others, and the user experience wouldn't be the same if the node I chose decides to shut down tomorrow.
  - r3bl 7y ago
    Here's how Mastodon does it: the owner's account is visible from the homepage of the node, the owner of every node that Mastodon includes on its homepage has agreed to give at least a three-month warning before shutting down, as well as to decentralize the control of the server to at least two individuals: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant I assume that Pixelfed wants to do something similar, but a little bit further down the line. As far as I'm aware, Pixelfed's current goal is to encourage people to start their own servers instead of relying on the main one. Whenever they feel like the main servers are gaining too much control of the network, they close the registration in order to pivot people to other nodes. Once other nodes start to stand out, Pixelfed will probably have more strict guidelines on which ones to link to.

zdunn 7y ago

Yea pixelfed has always been bad at onboarding. It's been brought up before but nothing has improved except making a pretty landing page. On instances where registration is closed, the only thing you see is a message telling you that and external links.

r3bl 7y ago

Your user experience will be the same regardless of which node you choose, since you can follow people regardless of what node they're using. Every user account is constructed as @user@pixelfed.tld. But, yeah, onboarding is a rough problem to solve when your goal isn't for one server to contain all the data. It requires learning some new stuff that I couldn't be bothered to learn for far too long. If privacy-conscious people aren't willing to learn them, nobody will and these projects will just die.

cynix 7y ago
> Your user experience will be the same regardless of which node you choose How do I know or find out who owns/runs the node I choose? Surely some nodes are more stable than others, and the user experience wouldn't be the same if the node I chose decides to shut down tomorrow.
- r3bl 7y ago
  Here's how Mastodon does it: the owner's account is visible from the homepage of the node, the owner of every node that Mastodon includes on its homepage has agreed to give at least a three-month warning before shutting down, as well as to decentralize the control of the server to at least two individuals: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant I assume that Pixelfed wants to do something similar, but a little bit further down the line. As far as I'm aware, Pixelfed's current goal is to encourage people to start their own servers instead of relying on the main one. Whenever they feel like the main servers are gaining too much control of the network, they close the registration in order to pivot people to other nodes. Once other nodes start to stand out, Pixelfed will probably have more strict guidelines on which ones to link to.