The recent drama surrounding the "Join mastodon.social" on the official mastodon app is disappointing.
The code for both mastodon and the app are open source, and people seem to think this will "destroy the fediverse and centralize all users on mastodon.social" meanwhile anyone can run a mastodon instance and migrate their account.
He literally wrote the platform that people are complaining on as if this was a for-profit, closed source entity like Twitter.
@dansup I think the main concern that people have is if someone searches for "Mastodon" in the app stores the first app that pops up is the official one, which now uses some weird UX, so most people will also most likely land on mastodon.social. This is in turn bad for the decentralised nature of the network if one instance becomes the main power (for example in terms of moderation policies and what to tolerate or to not accept in the network)
@jr@dansup
If a user finds it complex, he would never join fediverse so the whole point is lost.
If a user just joins mastodon.social without much stress, he will learn more and more about federation, and potentially move himself out of the instance for whatever reasons.
Losing users for the name of decentralization is just going to give more users on centralised platforms.
@peterkal@dansup I agree with you, but do you need to put all users on the same server if they don't want to decide? Why not pick a random one from the joinmastodon.org list instead for example?
@SecurityWriter@dansup But it still defeats the point of decentralising social media. If a very large percentage of users are signed up on one instance and Eugen changes the source with a feature people disagree with, it's beside the point that people can edit the source and make a version without that feature for their own instance, if a majority put up with the stupid features like they have done with Twitter for years. Obviously I have faith that he wouldn't do that, but he could.
@SecurityWriter@dansup Of course, I am a tech guy so I ended up making my own, mostly because all of the sign ups were closed on other instances, but I must admit, I am not sure what people find difficult about it. You pick an instance based around your likes, or location, etc. You then have an account and you can view the federated timeline to find some cool posts. The more you interact, the more your own Home timeline grows. The only thing different from Twitter is picking a server.
So long as it remains easy to up and leave an instance
This is really the key point, and exactly why I am trying out an alternative app: post history does not migrate on Mastodon. That's a degree of lock-in, and it gives instance admins more power over their community, yet less responsibility toward it.
If it weren't for the lack of post migration, I would have zero problem with the decision.
@SecurityWriter@smallpatatas@dansup At a glance, I think the easiest workaround is to keep the posts on the original platform. When someone reading the new account gets to the migrate date, all posts are then loaded from the original site.
Then if the migration site wants, it can slowly copy all the posts from the old instance.
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