At first @film_girl dismisses worries about defaulting to mastodon.social as “drama and virtue signaling”.
Then she says that migrating from mastodon.social to elsewhere has a big cost because you “can’t take your posts with you.”
Well, this is why mastodon.social shouldn’t be set as the default server to join: stuff like full text search aren’t supported on it, while that feature is supported on other servers.
@steakfrite yeah, to do that, they’d have to be able to migrate posts from instance to instance, which right now is both not possible and the attempts to do that have been shut down (even by people who found solutions and wrote PRs). People pretend moving doesn’t have a cost, but it does. You can’t bring your posts with you.
@atomicpoet@film_girl can we FIRST try to keep the already registered active here or coming back before thinking of solutions to attract new users? because i notice people create accounts, login & because there is no interaction, go back to twitter. And when you go to the #introductions page, you find new users looking for who to follow. If #mastodon can create a page like the local or federated feed where every mastodon user is shown randomly, new users will be able to click on those with profiles they find interesting and follow. This will solve part of the "no-interaction" problem driving users back to #twitter or #bluesky or other platforms
@atomicpoet both things can be true! You should have real data portability. That clearly wasn’t a design decision anyone valued at the beginning (and it still isn’t valued now) and it would make the whole “pick a server” thing less risky. But that doesn’t change that the experience for a new user is not good and figuring out sane defaults is a move in the right direction
It is drama and virtue signalling to treat defaulting on one client in one app as if it calamitously changing the project.
@atomicpoet I’m not arguing that the current implementation is the ultimate solution. I think you could do some different things to try to help people find their home server if you wanted. But I do think leaning on sane defaults is going to lead to more people actually joining and then using Mastodon. And arguing against that b/c of some unfair “advantage” mastodon.social has, feels counterproductive.
The problem is—and I can’t stress this enough—that certain people just want a Twitter replacement.
They’re not looking long term. They’re not considering future implications on network infrastructure. They’re not foreseeing that a temporary solution could potentially become permanent.
The goal here isn’t just to get everyone off Twitter, it’s to destroy Big Social.
And how to do that? Decentralize!
But if you re-centralize on one server, the Fediverse is as good as dead.
@atomicpoet I'm a Twitter refugee. I just wanted a Twitter not controlled by a psychopath. That's the truth. I like the idea of a fediverse, but imo, Mastodon's UI can be compared to running Linux because it's free vs Twitter being Mac OS, something that feels natural and easy. Albeit now quite a bit broken due to the psycho.
@atomicpoet
That wizard doesn't even need to be hard. Most social apps ask some "getting to know you" questions as part of onboarding so it would feel normal for everyday users.
Importantly, it shouldn't give options - just a single best-match server. People who want a list of server options or know the server they want to join already have ways of doing that
It could be as simple as:
Preferred language?
Location? (or 'don't care')
Tick some interests
On the backend, servers that are over a nominal size, have demonstrated reliability and moderation, and are open to new users can register and provide matching info. Single best-match server is returned to the user (randomised if multiple candidates)
@atomicpoet I would agree with this! But I think right now, moving to a default in one app on one platform is a good step towards getting there! I don’t think randomizing servers based on some list is a better solution. A wizard or a collection organized easily by interest areas seems like a good idea! But the thing is, you’ll always have to make choices and leave options off a list. And that’s not a failure!
And frankly, if data portability mattered, a lot of this would be moot.
@atomicpoet I'm getting the impression that finding people across servers is the challenge. Is that gets easy enough to do, decentralisation becomes a breeze. On Facebook I can probably find that person I met at the party. On Twitter I can probably find that author whose book I just read. On Mastodon I probably can't, even if they're here.
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