TL;DR: The current Mastodon-signup is only removing the confusion of users on first glance, because it either hides the server-choice altogether, or leaves them with a choice that is impossible to make at this point of their Mastodon-journey. Instead, it should introduce them to decentrality on a lower scale, with a handful of handpicked servers to choose from, such that the decision makes sense to them and shows them the merits and fun of the concept instead of scaring them away. Ideal would be to give them a sense of agency. Then, chances are higher that they consider migrating again in the future and eventually internalize it as a permanent option of the digital world.
I’ve been saying this from the go: users don’t need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.
What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn’t add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn’t a feature.
Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes “do you want to see Threads or nah?”, which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.
Not only decentralization is not a feature – it’s a burden. “Normal” users (read: non nerds like 99% of us here) couldn’t care less about which server they should sign up to.
Tbh then just tell em to sign up for mastodon.social, or a specific instance you know they’d like since you know them fairly well, problem solved. They can migrate later if they want anyway, fuck it, they’ll be fine. It’s a masto acct not a limb amputation, like hair so to speak “it’ll grow back.”
Mastodon has account migration? Are we going to get that?
Edit: Yes. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3976
And if it such a central feature
It’s not. It’s an important feature. It’s not a central feature.
That’s like saying two factor authentication is a central feature of Twitter. It’s important, yes, but it’s not central.
That kind of attitude leads to being scammed with popups and robbed of all your savings.
Go back to your VCR, Granma.
Though if decentralization were to be hidden, it’d be a good idea to cycle through lots of well established general instances for user signups under the hood. The vast majority of people are just going to choose the default options, and if it’s all going to funnel into mastodon.social, that’s a lot of centralization of users. Ideally no single server lords over all the others in terms of user count, because that gives them lots of power other instances may feel compelled to abide by. Having power spread out across many different people helps keep things in check, at the very least making large or drastic decisions more of a round table affair.
So… Am I missing something or are you suggesting an oligopoly, elected by a monopoly?
Here’s another way: stop referring to everything “Twitter-like” as Mastodon. Stop referring to everything “Reddit-like” as Lemmy. Those are both client platforms through which one can access ActivityPub content.
Conflating the platform with the provider with the protocol with the content is what’s confusing people.
I’m curious how you would explain Mastodon to a layman without mentioning Twitter.
… without mentioning Twitter.
That seems like a pretty arbitrary restriction. At this point, a basic knowledge of “what Twitter is like” is a pretty general-knowledge thing.
It is a general knowledge thing, but that means nothing if you don’t actually reference it.
Are you saying to start calling all of it ActivityPub? In which case, I would think that’d be extra confusing since lemmy and mastodon don’t cross-interface very well and you really need one client for each type.
I said no such thing.
Great, can you explain what you mean? I did not follow.
There’s still nothing like awesome lemmy instances that shows a server’s blocking and blocked by count?
That’s the biggest hurdle for me, there’s no guarantee who you want to follow won’t be blocked by your or their BOFH.
If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.
Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.
The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).
Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.
Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.
It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.
I think it should be like joining a mining pool, if you create a server you don’t have admin privileges like they exist here at the moment, you’re added to the pool of machines that stores info and users don’t choose a server at all, the servers communicate between themselves to make sure all info is backed up on at least three machines.
From the front end it looks like any equivalent private social media, one website for everything. On the back end side the servers are all over the place instead of in a couple data centers.
Server owners could decide to ban certain communities from storing info on their server, but that wouldn’t delete the community, it would just rely on being hosted elsewhere (hence the triple backup at all times) and users would be responsible for curating their own feed.
It would solve the issue of having to switch server if you disagree with the admin’s decision and would make the experience much more user friendly. Each new server would improve the stability of the whole network by taking part of the load and making sure that if one server is down, others have the same content available so no user can tell that there’s something wrong happening behind the scene.
Bad example, given that Hogwarts-house-in-bio is a reliable transphobic dog whistle, and transphobia is very much unacceptable in the fediverse.
