Your thoughts on onboarding

It's another week of pug-themed product development, and this time around we're turning the tables on you. Usually you ask questions about what the hell we're doing and we do our best to provide answers. This time, we're asking you questions about what the hell we're doing. Please send help.

Last week, we shipped the repost, the cornerstone feature of any viral moment – allowing content that resonates to repopulate. Slowly but surely we're building out the edges of the ActivityPub experience.

What's new with ActivityPub?

This week, we're thinking about onboarding. As we get closer to a public beta where many more people will be trying out ActivityPub in Ghost for the first time, how do we help them get started?

We have a few ideas, but in the context of this week's newsletter, we're interested to hear what you think.

The biggest challenge of ActivityPub is that it's too technical to easily explain to regular people. Nobody is interested in a jargon-laden diatribe about servers and federation. When simple questions have overly complex answers, people tend to switch off.

Our job, as product builders, is to understand the jargon and complexity of the specification ourselves, and then abstract as much of it away as we can so that end users don't have to think about it themselves.

Think of it this way: Your iPhone has 5G. How does it work?

If Apple did their job right, they know exactly how it works, and you should never need to. What you should know is: How does 5G benefit you?

Faster internet.

That's it. That's the whole thing. There might be examples of streaming 4k video or online gaming to underscore the value, but the core point is simply that 5G gives you faster internet.

If the first time you picked up an iPhone, it started telling you about MIMO, beamforming and network slicing across 3 different radio wave spectrum bands to deliver 20gbps network speeds with minimal latency... it would be a very different experience.

So, as we think about onboarding Ghost publishers to ActivityPub this year, we're also spending time experimenting with how we talk about it. How can we help publishers "get it" in the simplest possible way, without bamboozling them?

Here's one direction we've been playing with so far:

The core message we're working on here is that this section of Ghost allows you to follow others, and others to follow you. We're deliberately reusing a lot of design language and patterns from existing social networks in an effort to create a sense of familiarity when people experience this flow.

The more it feels like something they've used before, the less explanation and direct guidance is needed.

At least in theory.

Our question for you, this week, is whether this theory matches reality.

Does the framing in the screenshots above make sense to you?

How would you explain ActivityPub to a Ghost publisher to help them understand it, without using any technical terminology?

The thing we know publishers care about the most is growing their audience.