I've been thinking more about the hurtle of getting friends and family to use federated/self-hosted services. One of the issues to onboarding is people not understanding the idea of picking an instance. This has led, in part, to "default" instances, like lemmy.world, that could grow so large it would almost defeat the idea.

I've been thinking that I really wish DeltaChat had a web client. I have had a MUCH more difficult time getting folks to try that out than even federated SNS. But I was thinking how the heck are you going to pull that off without delta@chaos.social having to host the overhead for a robust web client and possibly host a gigantic server system that has to grow exponentially to keep everyone's private encrypted chats from all the possible email providers, really defeating the goal of their project.

This morning, I thought of a possible solution to both problems. What if you have a built-in transfer requirement. So you start with a default, say pleb.joinmastodon.org or noob.delta.chat and after a certain time (3 months or something) you have to either transfer to a new instance, including hosting your own client for in browser decryption web access to your encrypted mail chats, or your account (in the case of #mastodon) or web client access (in the case of Delta Chat) is shut off.

Do you think this could work?

@fediverse

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[–] DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 days ago

So, your solution to "ease onboarding" is to give newcomers more work? For a platform with far less content that's already confusing them with just signing up, let alone figuring out transfering or self hosting?

I think you VASTLY overestimate how many fucks people have to give, and also how tech literate the average person is. The average person can barely figure out how to change their web browser, and most really don't care about the awful shit big companies do.

This idea of yours would drive engagement through the floor and a respectable distance into the Earth's crust.

Ease of use should be the #1 consideration when it comes to onboarding people to something.