 I hint at this a bit in runyourown.social, but "UX-based onboarding" is a horrible compromise that social-media-at-scale like Facebook has convinced us all is "best practice." It makes sense if you are one company serving millions. I think this fediverse moment we are having is as good a chance as we are going to get to examine these assumptions, and experiment with throwing them away and trying very new (or very old!) things. 22 comments
@darius @theuniverse yesss! voice verification was the DEFAULT setting for many BBS host programs @darius as an autistic person with extreme social anxiety, the idea of onboarding via phone/video call is absolutely terrifying 😅 i'd much rather go through the UX onboarding and then poke around for myself to see how things work! 💜 :nd: @nuz Totally valid! @darius ah, that makes the idea a lot less scary! 😊 having the ability to decline the phone call would result in a much lower barrier to entry for people like me. it wouldn't completely eliminate it (assuming that talking to the person is still required to let them know i'd rather not do the phone call) but any further affordances that i can think of would likely make it too easy for bots and/or bad actors to make their way in. it's definitely an interesting problem to think about! :heart_pride: @nuz I could imagine it working via the standard server application process, though I admit I haven't given it a ton of thought! I do have people on this very server who did not want to do a call and I made a short personalized video for them to watch instead. @darius i haven't given it a lot of thought either, or evem poked around mastodon's (or hometown's) code base at all... but i imagine adding a couple of form fields to the server application modal wouldn't be tooooo complex (and there's always the "duct tape" option of concatenating all the responses into a single string before sending them to the back end). 😂 on the contrary, creating personalized videos for your call-averse server members is super thoughtful and sweet! 🥹 🥰  @darius yes!! There’s so much to be learned, still, from Stacy’s incredibly commonsense approach to building community. That comes across also in this interview with her from the Echo days, which just popped up online a few years ago: https://youtu.be/lDQ2o_Prgas @darius @theuniverse Tangent, but have you ever read Email Trouble by S. Paige Baty? It's a woman writing about, basically, dealing with the internet and being new to email AND being diagnosed with endometriosis, and it's an extremely weird but also very compelling book.
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@liza heh I bet if you found someone today as nerdy and young as you were then, they'd think the same thing about you @darius @theuniverse This should be a good read, at the time I found that small towns were overrepresented in the BBS scene and major "world cities" off the map -- presumably because people living where the action was were too busy actually living it. Fascinating to find that this was not actually the case!   @darius we fondly remember the glory days of IRC when everyone would help newcomers to figure stuff out, and it was a social bonding activity in addition to a practical function it's not that people are wrong to prefer things that are less work, but it's a missed opportunity these days |
Gregory's Server
Stacy Horn's "Cyberville" is a memoir about running a New York City based BBS that ran through the 1990s and early 2000s. She talks about having phone calls with new users and walking them through what they need to know about the place. Hugely influential on my thinking.
https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/stacy-horn/cyberville/9780446572064/
(Many thanks to @theuniverse for turning me on to this book btw)