@atomicpoet Short of nomadic identity a la Zot/AT Protocol, AP should allow "bring your own acct URI" and as a community, we could be hosting acct URIs and give users the ability to update the their WebFinger document
@atomicpoet Now that they are defaulting to mastodon.social, @spreadmastodon should stop defaulting to this server. They could instead use the round robin scheme people have suggested. We should seriously consider have a database of servers with some salient characteristics augmented with a query/filter mechanism.
@atomicpoet They should follow Truth in advertisements as well. They should add a cautionary statement: "A user could theoretically change the server, the posts made by them will not be moved to the new server and depending on the new server not all the followers and follows will come along. This may discourage you from moving."
@atomicpoet could this be solved, or at least mitigated, by randomly selecting the default from an approved list of instances. The approved part could be a little tricky, but shouldn’t be insurmountable. Leave an “advanced” sign up for those with some knowledge who want to pick their server. Could go a more wizard route that determines an instance based on people they may wish to follow, but I think that we could end up with the same instance recommendation more often than not.
@atomicpoet It seems like a great time for some of us (me) to look into moving to a less populated instance. I’ll have to figure out an easy way to make it all happen!
@atomicpoet the only thing I care about in respect to decentralisation is that decentralisation is why when I look at a post it shows a very low amount or zero of hearts and reposts, including recently when someone said their post had really took off and it had something like 2 reposts and no hearts and I told them they were incorrect it hadn’t taken off, but they were under the mistaken impression that their post had loads and loads of reposts and more replies than just mine
Other than that, decentralisation is never high on my mind in terms of what I care about
@atomicpoet I doubt this would be a good enough measure since people will most definitely be introduced to Mastodon through the official client which makes it so easy to just pick the biggest instance. Most wouldn't switch their accounts to a different instance later on anyway, unless something's bothering them. And we're talking about a minority here since only nerds would dare to leave the comfort zone & try out Mastodon. The fediverse still has a few years b4 becoming mainstream 💁🏻
@atomicpoet@mammoth I think the official Mastodon app is a bit unique in this regard, as it’s much more likely to be the first stop for exactly the sorts of new users who would frequently be scared off by having to pick a server.
I can understand why 3rd party clients might want to do the same, but I think it’s much less important that they hyper-optimize the onboarding process given that their users are typically going to be more experienced/savvy.
@atomicpoet@mammoth Basically, there needs to be a conduit to point people to in order to get them onboarded with as little friction as possible.
But not EVERY conduit for users to use the app needs to be like that. The route I’d lead a non-technical friend to get signed up is very different than the one I would send a fellow software developer down.
@atomicpoet@mammoth I wouldn't say it's the only way but maybe the easiest way. And most new user will resolve to the easiest way at first but then again it might be our duty as long-term users to make them aware of their possibilities so they have all the freedom to either move or create alt accounts when they see fit.
@atomicpoet Hmmm, I don’t know if it’s exactly the recentralization of Mastodon, since people are free to move about at any time and/or when they get their feet under them.
there's lots of things people can do, especially the people who endlessly bitched about how hard onboarding was, especially compared to fake decentralized #Bluesky. @Gargron got tired of their shit.
@atomicpoet It’s worth listening to Nilay Patel’s interview of Eugen Rochko, he was very clearly struggling with this. The explanation he came up there (very roughly paraphrased) is that “better have folks use mastodon.social as a starter and make it easy to migrate later than to abandon at the first step.”
@atomicpoet I don’t think it’s worth freaking out about Mastodon’s outsized user base. People have to start somewhere. They aren’t going to join 15 services at once. I had never heard of any of parts of the #Fediverse until coming to Mastodon. Now I have an account on several and keep tabs on updates and new and upcoming software. Mastodon is a Fediverse gateway drug.
@atomicpoet I would say that now is the time to insist on posts migration. Even if people start in these centralized instances, they need to feel comfortable migrating. Losing all your posts is a major handicap.
@atomicpoet
curious, i feel like you've done lot of research on most of these options, what do you feel are the strengths of each, if its possible to break it down that way?
@atomicpoet
Wouldn't it actually be quite trivial to make an own Mastodon client for any instance? Mastodon apps are open source, so just change the onboarding, publish it to app stores - and that's it!
@atomicpoet mishmash of different frontends and backends does nothing to dilute the perception that the fedi is complicated.
But I also think it can be a strength, backends should accept data not native to them, clients should make a best effort to display that data, even if they don’t natively support functionality.
I’d love to see more rapid experimentation & different projects co-opting each others features. Vanilla mastodon seems to drag it’s heels on that front.
@atomicpoet There’s definitely space though for UX that’s more ‘one size fits all’ without losing what makes the fedi great.
I’m not going back to big social and want to point people at something intuitive out the box. Most people I know IRL will use Instagram etc and it’d be great to be able to communicate with them without detracting from their experience. Especially if it’s something they’re not locked into
@uc Do you believe UX should paper over what the Fediverse actually is, which is a big complex network of 25,000 nodes -- all which communicate with each other?
Of should we minimize this in the name of "one size fits all"?
@atomicpoet no, I don’t think the only experience should be one size fits all at all. My hope is that so long as things talk to each other that there’s very much something for everyone
I've come to the conclusion that most people just do not care about their content. It's seen as ephemeral. Maybe (probably?) attitudes will change in a couple of decades, but the social graph (i.e. the relationships) is what's important.
That makes me think that maybe this whole soft centralization is not a huge deal. Mastodon, like all other monolithic entities, will mess up. Maybe it will be in a year or 5 or 10 years, but when it does, then people will be able to easily migrate out with their network.
@atomicpoet Or make the “default” a round robin of sorts of major servers so that it both spreads the load and continues to ensure decentralization is a key and frontline feature. Emphasize that place doesn’t matter, experience does.
I wish there was some kind identity/directory service that was distributed and replicated in pieces across the fediverse, so no chunk of servers gone bye-bye would destroy the identities
@atomicpoet with the proposal of third party Mastodon apps setting their sites as default is there a chance users will start referring to those apps as the social media site?
@atomicpoet I am not crazy about the horse race to be the dominant Twitter replacement. I think there’s room for both to exist separately- and in some cases, together. No war needed.
@HistoPol Honestly, having to pick a server keeps coming up again and again as one of the biggest hurdles keeping people from joining. It has to be addressed.
And I think the way mastodon.social handles this makes sense. You can very easily pick any instance you want, it's just not a mandatory step that puts a lot of people off.
@HistoPol Having everyone on one instance is also a problem and that needs to be addressed separately. I do like the idea a few people brought up of rotating the default suggested server. And moving to another server should preserve your posts, which I believe is being looked into.
I think having a website where instances looking for new users can register and self-qualify regarding some criteria should be feasible.
If it were dynamic, we could maybe even handle future massive immigration waves better, i/: when our best salesman, #Elmo, goes on a PR egoshooter trip again./i
@atomicpoet But...it addresses a huge roadblock to many looking this way. That decision may seem trivial to tech-savvy folk, but it's not for many who just want to sign up to a service.
@atomicpoet@CStamp And they still need a wizard for the second half of that solution, which is helping people find and move to another server once they're on board. They could almost have used the same wizard for both things.
@atomicpoet I can certainly see why they are doing it though, a lot of people I've spoken to who wanted to jump off Twitter and join Mastodon couldn't work out which server they should be joining, so at least getting them on board and using it, then once they're used to how it works, they can move when they're more confident with the system.
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