Good to see that https://encyclia.pub/ looks stable now for me @julian
Some thoughts and opinions 🧵
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First up, there were some teething issues right at the start. Don't worry about them; all of us were forewarned that this was a test.
Secondly, I don't think that https://encyclia.pub/ is obviously enough a social media thing.
By this I mean that a casual user, arriving at the website in a browser for the first time is unlikely to realise that this is a #fediverse / #mastodon thing (even if they know what these things are) and thus miss affordances that are available.
I think this is more about branding / styling than functionality, I recommend aligning the styling with whatever fedi platform has the highest usage in your target audience.
Possibly also a div of https://jointhefediverse.net/ -type content, not because we expect people to join the fediverse, but because we want to signal to people who have already joined that this is a fedi thing.
@stuartyeates I think the distinction between bridges and platforms as different types of “social media things” may be relevant for expectations here, and several of your suggestions are downstream from that distinction, as I think will be clear in my later replies. For example, you can't meaningfully “sign up” on Encyclia.
Most Encyclia followers are on Mastodon, but I worry that making the website look more like a Mastodon server could equally be more confusing than helpful.
@stuartyeates I think the Fediverse connection is fairly clear on https://encyclia.pub – it's mentioned twice in the first two sentences, and even given the “people don't read words” cliché, there are prominent Fediverse logos and a Mastodon screenshot.
If someone looks at that and says “I can't tell if this connects to the Fediverse”, then... I dunno. Design only has so much power to work miracles.
What would “https://jointhefediverse.net -type content” look like, compared to the status quo?
Thirdly, I hate the automated redirect to https://orcid.org/
@stuartyeates Timed redirects can be a big accessibility issue, and I've been going back an forth on whether Encyclia should have one. It has every measure I could think of to mitigate its issues (e.g. stopping the countdown on any key press or navigation), but I also feel strongly that people should not be lingering on the account pages if it's avoidable. More on why later under your last post.
Fourthly, I think that there are a whole lot of reasonably well aligned places you could link to.
#Wikidata/@wdscholia@wikis.world #OpenAlex #Crossref #Datacite etc all have things that can be done with an ORCID. There are probably a lot more that I don't know about.
Think about this in terms of growing a community of services that integrate ORCID.
