Brand new guides for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Looking for feedback!

submitted by Otter

fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39121040

We've been working on these for some time, and with the recent uptick in signups, we tried to finish up the first few pages so that new users could use them.

You can find them all on fedecan.ca under Guides & Resources. For those that are not familiar, this is the website for the non-profit (Fedecan) that manages lemmy.ca.

We're planning to gather some feedback on the technical Fediverse communities first, before sharing the guides more broadly, in order to catch any issues early.

If you want to add to them, feel free to reach out, and we can help you coordinate if someone else is also working on it.

The new sections:

Sections that are incomplete and relevant to new users. We have some work in progress for these, and hope to have them out soon:

A previously written section that didn't get posted about yet (thank you to Rooki): - https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/markdown

Future plans include

  • Guides for Moderators
    • Set up a new community (best practices for name, sidebar, image, banner, and getting it federated outwards)
    • Moderation Best Practices
  • Guides for Admins
    • Information on our infrastructure and setup

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13 Comments

cm0002

Very cool and adorable characters lol, but it's quite wordy for the average person, I would put a big ol "Tl;Dr" button/link/blurb/infographic at the top that just gets them the base info needed to quickly get started. If they want to learn more later, they can always come back when they're ready.

Otter [OP]

We can do that, which page do you feel needs it?

For example we moved some of the Lemmy introduction content to the detailed explanation page, and we can move more.

For some of the topic specific pages, I was thinking that anyone who was linked to the page might have already have gotten a brief TLDR from whoever linked to it

Avid Amoeba

Old Social Media

Oof, heavy shade. Well done! Makes the Fediverse sound cooler.

morrowind

Is this the first page people see? If so you should probably have a blurb before the background

Otter [OP]

The home page is here, and the Get Started button links to it

https://fedecan.ca/en/

We cut down on a lot of text from the initial drafts, so we can bring some of it back if the start is too jarring

asudox

Is it me or did this guide get inspired by the fediverse guide on peertube's official instance

Otter [OP]

Yup it did, we mentioned it here but I maybe we should make it more prominent? That video was one of the better explanations that I have seen so far, and there were a few things that we thought would be good to highlight on top of what it mentioned

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/credits

Aolley

What will get you more people who will stay here is a 'view all images' button like you have in RES, instead of having to manually open each image they want to see, very useful in image heavy communities. But please never use a card or full images default setting like new reddit turned into because that looks like web cancer and I won't use a site that does that

ColeSloth

This is fantastic and will definitely get some more people to join. My only nitpicks would be to make the "next page" links at the bottom a bit more obvious, and to fit the mobile apk links directly onto the page (or at least a handful of the most popular ones) instead of it being a separate link to go over them.

imaqtpie , edited

Wow this guide is really good and easy to read on mobile, amazing work!

SwizzleStick

Site either respects system light/dark theme or is dark by default. Either way, it's a plus for me that is often forgotten.

Guides are simple enough and the illustrations are cute.

You've got the balance of plugging your own instance while reminding visitors that there are others just right.

All useful info and not so much of it that it is overbearing.

Otter [OP]

:)

Something fun on the point about dark / light modes, the screenshots on this page swap between dark and light versions when the site theme is toggled

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/alternative-uis

SwizzleStick

So they do.

That's really neat!