Let me just start by acknowledging that this is a bit counter-intuitive, and I think that Fediverse communities with open registration are also really important. But today I’m writing to advocate for the creation of more “closed-off” Fediverse communities that make use of invite-only registration (as well as the tools needed to allow for that).
Alright but… why?
You might be thinking, “we want people to join the Fediverse, don’t we? How does having more closed-off servers where people need to be invited to join help us do that?”
While there are some remaining technical and convenience issues, most of us who want the Fediverse to thrive and grow will be the first to admit that one of the biggest hurdles is onboarding–getting people to simply pick a server, register and subscribe to communities.
Personally I think that picking a server really shouldn’t be any harder than picking a pair of socks to wear, but ultimately I think a big part of the problem is that we are offering new users a big list of options that they don’t yet understand or care about, then asking them to arbitrarily pick one.
How is a new user supposed to know which server to join (or which ones to avoid) if they don’t know anything about how the fediverse works?
Sure they could put in the time and effort to do some research, register for a bunch of different servers to get a feel for them, or maybe pick one arbitrarily. But many potential newcomers aren’t going to do that. Instead, they’re more likely going to just decide that the Fediverse is “too complicated” and return to their safe, centralized, familiar and established platforms, run by corporations and oligarchs.
Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket
Having thought about this (a little bit too much, probably), I think one roundabout way to address this problem is somewhat counter-intuitive: the creation of more closed-off servers, in which users are occasionally given sharable invite codes to bring other new users into the fold.
Let me break it down…
By giving someone an invite code to a closed-registration fediverse community you are:
- Instantly solving the server choice paralysis problem, by simply making the choice for them.
- Giving people something that they are more likely to perceive as being valuable, like Willy Wonka’s “golden ticket”, they now feel that they are part of an exclusive club.
- Creating the possibility of exponential viral growth, as every existing user has the means to invite a number of other users. This also means that the average community member may take a more active role in growing their community, since if they want more people on their server the best way to do that is by giving out codes.
Throwing invite codes around drives a lot of hype, and it gets people’s foot in the door without asking them to make an arbitrary decision about technologies and communities that they don’t understand. Keep in mind, this is no small part of how Bluesky became popular, by having an extended invite-only beta period during which people could be found begging for invite codes else on the internet.
Basically, I think closed-off servers with viral invitation systems are potentially a powerful tool to help grow the Fediverse, and so it’s something that Fediverse software should support.
What do you all think?
GMail did this early on, and it most definitely worked.
Being exclusive works really well. Like getting VIP access makes people feel important.
It’s what made Facebook cool. When only selected schools were allowed to join, students, faculty, and staff felt important.
I know they needed to grow, but keeping it just for college students would’ve kept its cool factor for a lot longer.
Google+ did it and it didn’t work.
I still don’t know what Google+ was trying to be.
And this guy worked on the Google+ team for sixteen years
The difference there is that Gmail was offering something (for free) that nobody else was at the time: the linear, conversation-based display of back-and-forth emails which we’re all used to now, and a whole gigabyte of storage. Everybody already had an email address when Gmail arrived on the scene, but Gmail was, from a pure usability perspective, better than the rest. People wanted access to that.
For an invite-only Fediverse server to be especially attractive, it needs to have some reason why access to that server specifically is more desirable than going to any of the tens (hundreds?) of alternative servers that offer literally exactly the same thing. Unless they start adding features the others can’t provide (which is close to impossible in an open-source project), what’s the benefit?
Awesome Lemmy Instances shows nearly 500 and its outdated.
Other than the benefit of being part of a more tight-knit community, you’re taking one of the biggest points of onboading friction away by giving them a code instead of asking them to pick from a list of servers they know nothing about.
Maybe this is a me problem, but especially on the threadiverse side (Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed), how much are we really in tight-knit communities based on our servers? I’m from Fedia, but I don’t really interact with Fedia people any more than I do anybody else, or even bother to take notice of where other people are from, unless they say something especially goofy. Communities in the “subreddit” sense are more likely to feel tight-knit than servers
I definitely get how allowing people to skip choosing a server is good for some types of potential fediverse users, I just don’t think Gmail works as an analogy for that. When Gmail was in its invite-only era, people weren’t paralyzed by choices of providers, they specifically wanted the one that was the best, and that was Gmail.
Some people pay a lot of attention to what instances people are from. I think I’ve had someone who jumped to negative assumptions about me because of what instance I’m using and I think I might have seen like one person from this instance - I pretty much never see people using the same instance, so its weird imagining someone seeing it enough to have an assumption about the users.
There are some servers that are a bit more tight-knit (hexbear comes to mind).
You’re probably right about Lemmy/threadiverse communities. I really don’t put much thought into what server someone is posting from.
But when it comes to Mastodon I kind of wish that I was on a server with a tighter local community so that I could make more use of features like the local-only feed and local posts. Obviously I can switch to a smaller server or make my own, so it’s not really a problem, but with Mastodon there are features that theoretically benefit from having stronger local communities.
Still, the meat of this suggestion is really just to use invites as yet another way to bring people into servers, in addition to having a big list of fully open servers, as well as application-based closed servers.
Most people don’t even know about Lemmy or the Fediverse lol, you basically trick them into thinking it’s something exclusive and then they join, that’s a success