I had shared an earlier version of this last week, and a draft of the updates a few days ago. Thanks to everybody for the feedback!
Here’s the key points:
- Don’t tell people “it’s easy”
- Improve the “getting-started experience”
- Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
- Prioritize accessibility
- Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
- Invest in moderation tools
- Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
- Values matter
- This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity
The problems start appearing when people start trying to share links to stuff with people outside of the site or click on links outside the site themselves. If the link takes a person to a different instance and they don’t know federation even exists they’re going to be very confused. IMO this is one of the big problems that needs to be solved since sharing links to things with friends is a huge way sites get advertised.
Yep, clients/UIs need to detect links to other instances and automatically reformat them to instance-local links. Configurable and indicated cleary that this happened, with a clickable icon next to it and resulting popup or some such.