I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
Much like when I went from Twitter to Mastodon, finding “my people” is a lot more work. It’s unpleasantly easy for links to a community to take me directly to that instance instead of leaving my on my instance where I’d be able to subscribe and interact. But also like Mastodon, the experience is much nicer once things start getting set up. Really nice not getting pestered to use the app constantly!
Yeah there needs to be a little more user intent “modelling” (probably no more than just a quick sense check really) on some of the design decisions.
I was thinking about suggesting a “watched instance” status that would contribute to a feed that sits between “all” and “subscribed”, so if I find an instance say mytown.org, then I can get a Watched feed like All but just every community for my town. This would differ from All which would allow federated communities such as arguments@farawaytown.net to appear in the feed.
I want to second that it’s very frustrating how links tend to go to the parent instance rather than my instance, as it seems like that’s seldom what a user would want.
Pretty much the same thing for me. I’m finding it very annoying to be taken to the instance, there must be an easier way.