We’ve known for years that our onboarding in Micro.blog is bad. It’s tough to start with no followers and no recommended users. But even so, we’re not going to do the Threads or TikTok thing to just show a bunch of random popular crap. There’s gotta be a middle-ground to help people without that.
@manton onboarding is a tricky thing to get right. I wonder if some kind of category/topic based approach could work where you let users choose topics of interest and surface some of the discover content for those topics. Then it’s up to the user to find people to follow from there.
@khurtwilliams To be honest, I don't know. We've thrown around a lot of ideas, but it's a difficult problem (for all platforms).
@manton I think you have a fairly small number of supported Emoji-tags, no? Could you show a list of these tags and let people click one to show the latest 20 tagged posts or so, and make it easy to follow people who posted there? Instant interesting posts?
Following a hashtag on Mastodon helped me a lot in that way.
(And maybe have a search form if they have a friend on Micro․blog or Mastodon they want to follow)
@uliwitness Good ideas. I think we have all the pieces to do that, just they aren't put together in an obvious way for newcomers.
@manton You could also do a “Tom from MySpace” approach and auto-follow one specific account at account creation. The official Micro Blog announcements account or so would probably be safest.
Maybe as an alternative let people generate an “invite link” that auto-follows them (and maybe gives them a badge for the referral), and just do the official account for people who come in without a referral.
@manton Love the stance you’re taking on this. 💙
Maybe an empty state that invites them into a flow where they select some interests/emoji, and then can see people to follow who post with this emoji?
@manton Or maybe there’s actually a fork here: whether people wants to follow news/events/public figures, or want to find/invite their existing friends?
@manton it is not my impression that many people would sign up for Micro.blog because they head about it on the radio…could some proxy for ‘who referred you?’ give a new user recommendations based on the most popular members of the nearby graph of the referrer?
@manton Volunteer newbie-greeting MB ambassadors? (That's the extent of the thought, I have no idea how this would work...)
@manton My personal difficulty with onboarding was it starts you out with two of the most confusing tools: cross-posting and the social network-like follow and replies. I understand why they are the two most attractive features but they can also be the most complex to understand. The thing that helped me finally understand Micro.blog was seeing it as a collection of modular, connected web tools centered around an account. You can set your account up as a plain ol' blog, a podcast website, a read-it-later aggregator, a book tracker, etc. Twitter/Mastodon clone is just the one you are starting everyone out with.
@manton To your central point, Threads approach is terrible. At the same time, we do need a better landing page for the new users before they are led to Discover timeline. List of official handles. Some users posting across emojitags? Or in Discover timeline?
@rcbo A "fork" is interesting, and something I've heard recently too... If someone is into photos, they might want to see photos and import from Instagram. If into books, they want to import from Goodreads and blog about what they're reading.
@manton Choose several emoji you like in onboarding and present the “discover” areas from those Tagmoji™
@kq @manton I agree and I think others have requested. It would help a lot. I think I remember reading that it's for aesthetic reasons? It wouldn't bother me and I would value the function. I wonder if there might be a way to have tags hidden or visible but de-emphasized stylistically?
And it's worth mentioning again that currently searching in the discovery feed for any keyword will only search within the subset of posts that have previously been featured on the discovery page. And the emoji list, while cute, is such a tiny list and cannot begin to actually represent a diversity of interests. Perhaps I'm outside the norm but I've not used it once.
@manton maybe let people describe their interests with tags… those joining MB could then search or be presented with a tag cloud and click what they like, directing the discovery process… something like what Apple is doing with Apple Music onboarding…
@kq Two primary reasons for my reluctance: 1) hashtags often clutter up a post and hurt readability; 2) hashtags don't do much without search, and hashtag search usually has complicated side effects, like algorithmic trends and amplifying divisive topics. I know not everyone agrees with me on this.
@manton I appreciate that you recognize this. While MB suits what I need I could not see recommending it to friends.
@manton I’m sure you’ve already thought of it… maybe you could send people to Discover and tell them
why? Or have the empty state of the timeline be a link to Discover with an explanation. Something like that.
@manton I agree about hashtags cluttering the Timeline. I don't really want to see them. Perhaps in the same way I can choose under Account to hide or show replies, I could choose to hide or show hashtags?
@odd @ryanbooker That's basically what we do now: show Discover by default and auto-follow @news (because @help is only for replies). I've kind of resisted auto-following our own accounts, but maybe there should be a 1-click "follow the team" button.
@manton Yes, please do this. All three very active members of the team will post to the timeline about relevant Micro.blog topics. News is very good but is not a typical company blog with comprehensive coverage.
You could also suggest the community-based accounts (@challenges, et al.) along with the appropriate explanation for why each account is worth following.
@manton Yes, of course, I didn’t think this through. And the one-click I think is a good idea. (I also forgot that @vincent and @cheesemaker also should be added).
@manton have you considered that the reason your engagement level maybe so high is because people who do stick around, stick around! I think on boarding is a easy trap to get into, and sometimes users do need to figure it out on their own what works for them. I feel overuse of onboarding generally helps acquisition but not engagement. When folks put in effort they are more likely to stay. It’s a very tough problem to solver for, for sure.
@manton I liked pinned hashtags on Mastodon. But maybe even better (or at least different) the ability to have pinned searches. If there was a powerful search/filtering feature.
@timapple I guess it depends on whether the frequency of updates not being nearly constant is a bug or a feature. I can see it being both ways. It’s probably helpful to give new users appropriate expectations that Discover is fundamentally a different thing than a “recommended” algorithmic timeline that continuously changes. Encouraging users to not check it constantly is likely a good thing - and can give them time to explore the other benefits of Micro.blog, as their home base on the internet.
@SimonWoods @odd @manton Bluesky has a “Bluesky Team” feed. I like the idea of feeds with different groups of people. I think @news is a good one to follow automatically, perhaps even @monday would be cool. However I’m kinda against the idea of forcing everyone new to follow the “team”. Posts are not always about Micro.blog… and they might be alienated by that. “Who is that person???”, “I didn’t follow them…” etc
@vincent Agreed. That is partly why we don’t do that, and also I’m generally against recommending specific people because then those people will be more “popular” than everyone else. The team is a unique case, sort of.
@pratik @vincent @manton I also agree; the group feed is a great idea, which makes me think of Tumblr having the "staff" blog and when Twitter had shared blogs with each post attributed to the individual team member.
I'm very much against forcing anyone to follow anything, though suggestions could work well since the people who are likely to be enthusiastic about the community are more likely to be interested in at least seeing the team accounts.
I think somebody earlier in the conversation — can't recall who right now and I struggle to read flat conversation threads — suggested asking the community to opt-in as suggested accounts for following, which I also like a lot; similar to how people were asked to contribute quotes for the homepage.
When it comes to the popularity issue, the suggested accounts could be rotated. Also, we already have manual recommendations in the form of Micro Monday and I think that has worked well.
@manton I think @stupendousman makes a good point about not making it too easy. That said, I agree this is maybe harder than it needs to be.
One valuable resource not yet mentioned is the Roll Call threads. New folks could find members of their flock there.
@manton I used the "Following # users you aren't following" a lot to find people to follow in the beginning. I wonder if something like that could be used as a starting point to make a MB user directory (opt-in). Maybe filter out inactive accounts and let people search on the "About Me" section.
@philbowell @manton I’m a big fan of this approach. I think it’s a safe assumption that someone coming to Micro.blog is coming from somewhere else. In that case, tailoring the onboarding based on that would be incredibly valuable. Are you here for microblogging? For photo blogging? For book blogging? Etc
@fgtech @stupendousman Great point, I think the roll calls are really helpful. And we do have a list of them on the Micro Monday site which we should probably link more prominently.
@odd No. I think the current list of tagmojis is way, way too limited. I've only rarely (maybe never) used them just because they don't cover topics I'm intereted in. I think for account pages just leave it wide open to any word anyone can think of to describe their interests rather than limit it to choices of any kind.
@manton I think the Discover feed is great. I myself am not really too interested in using the social features of Micro.blog, I just like using it for the blog service.
@Miraz @manton Here’s another 👎 against hashtags. They were useful in the early days of Twitter so you could tag a tweet using only one of your precious 140 characters but should now be allowed to wither away. Much more useful now would be better search. I’ve occasionally found topics and people using Google with site:micro.blog
