@dharrison @stuart @mastodonmigration I don’t even use the client, I just checked it out because I know some of the people working on it. But this criticism seems really really bizarre to me.

Every mastodon onboarding experience I’ve seen anywhere else feels like a gauntlet of over-explanation, in which users need to learn new words and new definitions for old words before they have even a chance of correctly navigating the process. Every article ever written about mastodon acknowledges that this process is terrible, and tries to give advice to navigate it, with some saying it doesn’t matter (except it turns out it does) and others pointing to specific servers which are often closed to new sign ups or sometimes shut down unexpectedly. “Needs to be better” is an extreme understatement. Onboarding for mastodon is currently broken.

if you don’t want mastodon to be popular, if you don’t agree with the goal of eventually having 100 million mastodon users, that I suppose the difficulty of onboarding is part of the point. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to see this as anything other than a new user experience that is about a million times better than any other I’ve seen for mastodon.

but hey, let’s improve it by eliminating the default choice, which happens to be the best one for users completely new to mastodon. We can just make new users learn all about the fediverse and maybe answer a short quiz demonstrating that they have acquired the correct knowledge before choosing on one of two well-explained and totally equally weighted buttons. Perfect. Fixed. No notes.