Related: I have been thinking about a welcome or etiquette bot, that instance admins could suggest, or have auto-followed by new users.
It could take many forms, but some of the basics would relate to welcoming and informing about fedi-etiquette.
Suggest to new users to make an intro post and pin it to profile
How the timelines, and privacy settings work
Explain how hashtags work
Remind users to use alt text if they have posted images without
Resources to getting started, etc.
Obviously a bot like this wouldāt replace the welcome a community instance might offer, but it might be useful for on-boarding, and establishing a common culture across instances.
Surely a bot informing new users about āfedi-etiquetteā would be useful to more than just Mastodonā¦ But I get your point, it would be best to have a common bot with different narratives adapted to each software.
What most people consider āfedi-etiquetteā is largely mastodon-centric, and results in drama when users of software that is not mastodon-like try to engage with the fediverse.
I think that we should not try to normalize working around bad software design (for example, all the āCW your $topic postsā because the author canāt just out-of-band tag their posts and the recipient canāt set her own effective filtering) as a technical community which is supposed to be forward looking.
You are right about the masto/pleroma-centricity, on some level it should be the responsibility of each software to facilitate the on-boarding experience. One problem is that most seem to be coming from Twitter and bringing that culture into the federated space. Another problem, looking forward, is also that other software with existing communities may adopt AP, without considering this trans-boarding.
We all know how certain people abuse free speech to insult or harass others. Free speech is a tool for collective liberation, not a tool for oppression. But this does not seem obvious to all.
I agree that itās extremely important to provide a stellar new user experience, and that the current fediverse is severely lacking in this regard, but Iām not sure it should be in the form of a bot. Iāve seen all kinds of things shoehorned into an instant messaging UI in Telegram, and they donāt always work well in that format. Itās the same concern here over making the welcome UI based on posts, as those are about the only common feature among all existing AP implementations.
Besides, how would a bot remind someone about something? Using a privately addressed Note? That wonāt work with Smithereen as I intentionally reject anything non-public. How would it explain privacy settings if Smithereen has none? Also Smithereen doesnāt have pinned posts. And hashtags. IMO, itād be better if every implementation would create its own onboarding experience that best suits its intended use and feature set. As with all universal abstractions, the bot would either have to use very vague phrasing to suit all possible UIs, or be too confusing if your server software isnāt about microblogging.
Then thereās the problem of centralization. The bot will be hosted on some instance, and, in a sense, the rest of the fediverse would depend on that instance, thus somewhat defeating the purpose of decentralization.
The one thing that doesnāt seem to be addressed by anyone is the discovery process of the people you already know. Mastodon claims to solve discovery by having public feeds (instance and global), but those only help you see random people you donāt know ā which is not what most people want. I canāt repeat this enough, but itās absolutely crucial to have some form of (decentralized) global search that would at least allow associating user IDs in centralized social media to ActivityPub IDs. Iām thinking about using something like a DHT (distributed hash table) made out of instance servers, but this has never advanced past my thoughts and so is still open for debate. This alone would go a long way to solve the dreaded āIāve signed up, now whatā problem.
Why? It could as well be designed collectively, adapted to each software implementation, and hosted there. I see no reason why a single bot would be useful. That is, each instance would have a version of a welcome bot that would provide one or more narratives for the Fediverse, and one or more narratives for the instance itself. Does it make sense ?
I think it does make sense in the way you present it @how. And with the idea being about a sort of general AP extension, it may be moved to #fediversity:fediverse-futures category, for a bit more brainstorming? Fits better than #community (which is more about this forum and related sites).
Iām not the only one whoās done hours of unpaid work in the last 6 months explaining the bare bones basics of the fediverse to the Titter migration. Imagine if the fediverse really took off and starting growing 10 times as fast? How quickly would our community connectors burn out? I would love to have some of this work automated, please and thank you.
To the degree there is anything universal to how the fediverse works, every new account needs to receive a TL;DR explanation of these and links to more detailed ones. Concepts like;
interoperating instances
@mention addresses
hashtag search and its limits
instance-based moderation
silencing and defederation
New accounts on each app also need to receive TL;DR of the key concepts for using their app, again with links to more detailed explanations. Eg for Mastodon, this might include;
posting levels
report/ mute/ block
mute conversation
That way, newcomers are at least introduced to these concepts, and have somewhere to look for more details. The work of community connectors can be focused on welcoming them, introducing them to others with similar interests, and answering questions about anything that still confuses them.
I see this as something individual implementations need to do. As people have already stated, the Fediverse is diverse enough that there cannot be an universal tutorial.
Yes, good point. I did not read upwards on this thread, but Kaniini is very right in stating that.
Though what you might have is Microblogging-specific welcome bot, i.e. for the ābusiness domainā. Currently so many apps position themselves in this domain and it confuses newcomers who suddenly learn thereās more than mastodon.social