A portal for new users to join Mastodon, exiting users to enrich accounts with more follows, and for organizing to help #TakeBackSocial and spread the open social web and the Fediverse.
This goes completely against the principle of "federated network". It's directing new users to join one instance, with plans to expand the list of instances that can be joined through this website to... four. To be selected as one of the four (actually three, since mastodon.social will always be one of them) instances, the instance has to abide by mastodon.social's rules, and selection is done by mastodon.social staff. At what point does "make onboarding easier for new users" become "return to centralized social media except Eugene Rochko instead of Elon Musk is CEO"?
Andreas, Did you see this? This is where we are building for, would appreciate any notes to this idea and if it would alleviate your concerns about centralization: our goal would be to swap out one sever and swap in new ones over time to spread out far beyond four overall. And Mastodon.social staff are not involved and would not have any say over the four.
I chose not to mention the issues that were already mentioned in the Mastodon thread like the 15K active user requirement allowing only large servers to qualify, which still lets a few big players dominate the network. My idea is based on the assumption that random people who aren't interested in the Fediverse discover Mastodon by being directly linked to posts and accounts on Mastodon, rather than by being linked directly to spreadmastodon.org without knowing what is on the site. Therefore, the instance someone is linked to would be the instance they want to sign up on. I think the best solution would be to let individual instances deploy this application on their own instance and have the "Create Account" button direct to it (instead of the standard Mastodon sign up flow). Instances will customize the sign up destination/recommended accounts to their own instance, so users will still be distributed across many instances while enjoying a simple and consistent sign up process.
Our goal: to be a better place for new users to onboard, and to be an organizing hub or those looking to spread Mastodon and the Fediverse. Opening up all the source code so any Fediverse portal can reuse. For example a SpreadKbin site could modify and use.
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