It stroke me that saying things like “First, you have to choose a comunity to join the fediverse” might be a better way to ease onboarding nwecommers than “First, you have to choose a server”.
Although the latter might be technically more accurate, the former is what people might
- understand better;
- ends up being what they’re really doing;
- frighten them less;
- reinforce the “community” contribution aspect;
- lead them to better understand the federated aspect as they realize that communities are not isolated and can talk to eachother.
What do you think?
“Let me know in the comments bellow…” - just kidding!
You are right. We get lost in the technicalities and forget how difficult it is for non technical users to understand the technology.
Speaking about community and the “Benefits” would be better for everyone.
A “community” is identified by a romaine name. And communities still speak to other compatible communities.
At work, seeing how the marketing team keeps changing wordings to fond the one with better conversion rate, I find what we do here is just bare bones.
When you set up email, I think you’d say you “choose a provider” not “a server” even if that’s essentially what you’re doing.
Is there a downside to using the term “provider” when talking about choosing an instance? Ultimately, that is where the difference would be. The entity in charge of the instance needs to be trustworthy and have a moderation style/philosophy that the user agrees with.
Provider doesn’t really have any downside
An immediate problem is that “community” is a term in the threadiverse, where !fediverse@lemmy.ml is a community. It also might make it sound like an exclusive space with a specific topic, whereas in reality when you join a server you can still interact with the wider network.
IMO this is a concept that can’t be expressed in one word when someone is unfamiliar with the concept. We put together this guide a while back to try and explain it: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started
We could call it a home, shortened from home server. I didn’t pick a server over another. I keep using other server’s communities. What I did was that I called one server my home on the fediverse while you called lemmy.ca your home.
It’s not perfect but it would solve the term conflict.
I feel like that’s getting there, though ‘home’ doesn’t sit right with me somehow; too many other connotations (after all it’s still somebody else’s server, unless you’re self-hosting it, you’re still using it on their terms so it’s not a ‘home’ in a typical sense).
Maybe ‘gateway’ or something like that?
I like home, gateway, or home base.
Maybe neighborhood?
Maybe neighborhood?
Showing my age, that reminds me of Geocities.
