We recently had a great article about how to treat people who are considering moving from commercial social media to the Fediverse. The first rule was: stop telling them it's easy! After all everyone faces a learning curve the first time they try something.

We should probably compile a "how-to" of best advice for interacting on the Fediverse, or at least the macroblogging pods. Here are some of my thoughts.

~ It would be nice to have a message sent automatically with interaction tips to new users. We should probably do that for our pod, if nothing else.

~ We need to encourage new people to use #newhere.

~ Please, only use "family" for actual family. Many people like to keep friends and family separate. It also strikes me as creepy when people jump into that category when I know nothing about them.

~ If you want to make friends, a good way to start is by putting up an "I'm new here" message about who you are and what you like.

~ Make good use of hashtags. I don't think I've been doing this well. I think generally we haven't been doing this well. We could have discussion groups specifically for writers, artists, lovers of scifi, lovers of cooking, etc. @su ann lim has done a remarkable job of founding and organising Checkin. We could do the same for other groups.

~ To make connections people need to realise that they should just start putting stuff up with hashtags. Whenever someone friends me, I check their stream to see if they are a spam account, a troll, or any number of other unpleasant things. An empty account does nothing to inspire me to friend back.

~Then we get to all the netiquette stuff. Once upon a time individual BBSs used to regularly post their own netiquette standards to help users understand what is expected of them. These days that sort of list is hidden inside a corporate terms & conditions statement to which you are supposed to click "agree". Who learns from that? What we have all learned is to click without reading a word. In Diaspora we have that "Be excellent to each other!" link. How many people realise that's a link? How many people read it? I think we all need reminders now and again about what is expected within a "social" environment.

Any other thoughts?
Thanks!

#newhere