As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
If the fediverse ever wants to scale, something like this has to come about. I personally think we need a whole lot of regional servers. For example, we make a cluster of servers by country, so lemmy.us, Lemmy.de, etc. Then, when those servers start to fill to a certain threshold (say 1000 users), we break them out regionally, so lemmy.ne.us, lemmy.se.us, etc. The way servers are assigned would be by selecting your country and region. It shouldn’t be too complex and would simplify the sign up people for a lot of people.
You’re assuming that all those servers would have the same policies and admins.
As we can see from their recent announcement, the LW team has some specific policies in their Terms of Service that no other instance replicates.
You are thinking about load balancing, but that can be handled by Cloudflare or something else, it’s doesn’t have to be a different instance.
We already see lag in comments and posts with the current load. It could be buggy apps as this is relatively new, but who knows. I am no network engineer, but I would imagine that issue to only get worse as user numbers increase.
If you see lag, you should try using a different instance. LW was noticeably slow during summer 2021, a lot of people moved to other instances due to that
Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there’d be a flood.
So what, should we have a website where you push a button and it sends you to a random instance to sign up?
Just imagine the surprise when a new user is placed in hexbear or one of the porn servers.
Then it was fate and they should just accept it.
Sorting Hat for Lemmy?
Yeah, things requiring choosing a instance like, say, email, are doomed to fail
I’m guessing you meant this sarcastically, but you may have been right for the wrong reasons. Look at this graph, by the metric of the way the fediverse works that is a failure. Apple and Google are massively dominant because people don’t want to think about it and most just go with their phone os maker who makes them create one when setting it up, and there is no fediverse server equivalent to that.
This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
joinmastodon.org (the ‘official’ way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So… I guess that’s not a barrier after all.
Mastodon is never going to be That Platform and that’s ok. It doesn’t need to be. The ActivityPub protocol is the highest value aspect of Masto, and there are a handful of other, larger, easier to use platforms that are adopting it.
Really? What other platforms?
Bluesky is far more user friendly and that’s why the people are going there. I get it, y’all love federation and ActivityPub, but no one wants to pick an instance, much less read a manifesto on decentralized social media. (Frankly, Lemmy has much of the same issues.)
I have had a Mastodon account since Elmo Muskrat bought Twitter, but it’s practically useless as few outside some specific IT-oriented users are on it. I got Bluesky, and it’s been way better as it attracts a larger variety of people.
I think the bigger problem is that there’s no universal search that will find something on any of the instances you aren’t blocking.
Search is not authoritative like it is on centralized social media.
im gonna be real, this guy sounds like a loser. he talks about the progressive political lean and the porn as if they’re BAD things
Porn industry is certainly a bad thing though. It is quite hostile to women, and many have been harmed by it and wished they had a good exit.
Bit I definitely agree that progressive lean is a good thing. Fwiw I didn’t read this article.
I know women in porn who say the opposite.
When there in it, i’m sure there is going to be a bit of a bias.
Certainly some will say that, and even more would do if your environment is privileged (such as a safe neighborhood in the west or USA). You have to look at aggregate data, not anecdotes.
All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.
If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.
I remember when I first tried to use Mastodon and struggled with how best to make it work, so I asked what was probably a basic question to the Enlightened™. Instead of being helped, I was met with “it’s easy, maybe you’re just dense?”.
Then I thought that maybe Mastodon doesn’t have the kind of people I’d want to interact with on it.
Mastadon is nice. I like Bluesky better. I think if they can eventually talk between the two, they will both win.
You can bridge the two now.
Bridging never really works.
