Setting “mastodon.social” as the default on the main Mastodon mobile app kicked a can down the road and turned into a keg of gunpowder 🥫➡️🧨
It might have solved a UX problem (instance selection) in the short term. But it introduced an exponentially harder sociotechnical problem: scaling moderation.
Instead, we should:
a) increase the number of smaller and well-moderated instances.
b) turn instance selection UX into a productive type of friction.
@andresmh why couldn't they have simply turned it into a drop down menu that lists all the servers they have themselves already vetted on joinmastodon.org ?
Thats still a pool too small, but way more palatable than favouring one server over the rest.
@andresmh Yes. They say "its to make onboarding easier", except that by funneling everyone to an under-moderated server, you are deliberately making onboarding harder by making sure every signup needs to then migrate accounts as well.
I dont know why its assumed to not matter, but Ive migrated and I know for a fact its hard and a major put off.
Having listed themselves as the default instance in the official app, they have something like 223k accounts, overwhelmed moderators, and consequently, they are targeted by crypto spammers who set up new accounts without any gating and then use those to flood accounts in every instance. (It's mostly #crypto spam.)
As a result, other instances are blocking #mastodonsocial to try and keep their moderation workload lower, and only the nice ones will ever check if they get this week's flood under control.
If you do want to relocate, it is recommended that you use a web app to manually export your contacts so that you do not need to rely on server-to-server communication to transmit them reliably.
It seems there's even some delay on my powerful instance, but only for some minutes or so. I'm deducing this based on the notification flood. Or then the issues are all round, not sure which way. Even #MastodonSocial struggling? #Eurovision causes quite a heavy server load. #MastoAdmin#Servers#Instances#MastodonInstance#SysAdmin
Ok so it seems that spam bots are starting to reach some users from mastodon.social once again (I'm gonna have to mute the instance once more on my other accounts since tech.lgbt already limited the big instance)
Be on the lookout Fedi, and as always...Report first and Block!
Do you like the idea of a free, decentralized social media? Then make the move today. Simply use the built in migration feature and move from mastodon.social to one of the smaller servers.
You can choose a server that has a theme that fits your posting habits, a server local to where you live or a generalist server in your language.
Graphs of the sizes of fediverse instances, how common they are, and where the most people are! 🧵
Data pulled from https://instances.social/ (by @TheKinrar) and excludes pawoo and baraag as they're heavily blocked for good reasons (it seems)
Breaking down instances by the number of users into bins (that are quasi human friendly logarithmic), we see that the majority (55%) have 2-50 users, ~33% have 1 user, and almost all instances have less than 5,000 users.
> Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole #Fediverse, on a single instance.
> Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.
@edavies It would work if the mastodon.social domain would be changed to something like mastodonbeginners.social. With such domain name many people would migrate to other instances naturally, as soon as they would start to feel uncomfortable with "beginners" part.
Guys there is spam storm on mastodon.social ... bitcoin and porn spamers hit this server SOOOO bad... man!
It is not visible on our dashboard because those messages are not public :D someone scraped user list and sending unlisted, direct messages from accounts not listed as bots.
@fediversenews
Obviously I haven't pulled the whole database down, but having poked around the fedidb page a bit, I haven't seen any other instance other than a *key instance have the sort of growth trend that #mastodonsocial has had the past few months, which is nuts given how big it already is.
Like, there's a clearly a centralisation event occurring here likely to only get bigger given the defaults in the app, and also likely willfully chosen by many of the users.
@jupiter_rowland@maegul #mastodonsocial
And then there are the not so much "übergeeks", just real professionals who have so much stuff on phones for professional reasons . . . . . . and only using desktop browser
What is it exactly, you are complaining about ?
I hope no-one minds but I'm testing out #Calckey & have randomly followed a couple of people so I can figure out how to use that place. It's so confusing & overwhelming. I've no idea what I'm doing.
Just ignore me over there.
But #MastodonSocial is so broken w the new change it's unusable for me now. I have to migrate somewhere & have no idea where to go.
Hmm, that's new. But how are they appearing there? The (first) Verification-URL of accounts shown on lists of accounts (Follower, Following) directly on Mastodon. First I thought, that's part of the update to 4.1.2. But I see it only on #MastodonSocial, not other instances with the same version. What's going on?