We've been talking a lot (in different issues and on the network) about the experience of brand new users joining Mastodon, so I made this issue to summarize some of the current problems, and also the current solutions we have.

My hope is that a more holistic approach to this problem can give us a better understanding of what things are likely to help or not, and generate better ideas then just tackling individual parts in isolation.

On Mastodon, acquiring a new user requires four discrete steps.

1. Finding an instance

   Or, more specifically, finding an instance that fits the individual user, has a local community they'd like, etc. Currently both https://joinmastodon.com and https://instances.social attempt to solve this problem, but they have a lot of steps for users to take, don't have a lot of ways to differentiate between different instances, and in general just leave people more confused then before.

2. Signing up for an account

   This is classical onboarding. The current onboarding clickthrough is a good start, but it would be great if it was more interactive, and explained more parts of the software as you used it. For example, it would be great if it walked you through making your "first toot"—which could also serve as a way of helping others find you and interact with you, if it's appropriately tagged.

3. Content discovery

   Once we get users on the site how do they find enough people to follow that they're going to experience the software fully and enjoy the experience? For example, tumblr asks you to select 5 or so "categories" of things you're interested in and auto-populates your timeline with interesting posts from those tags. Facebook does contact voodoo magic to find your exact clones and suggests those. Something inbetween those would probably be the best for us.

4. ~~Retention~~

   Once (if?) users have had a good experience, how do we help them remember to continue to use the site, instead of just forgetting about it? Notifications emails definitely help here. We could probably also do a better job about suggesting mobile apps, and maybe doing digest emails if you're not very active.

anyway I don't think every suggestion here has to solve all 4 things at once, but it seems nice to get all of the current thinking about this stuff on the same page.