As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
It actually doesn’t.
Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it’s no more complicated than Twitter. It’s just that nobody knows that.
Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It’s no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.
Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won’t be the bee’s knees, and you won’t know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it’s easy-peasy.
I mean, it’s a network of indeoendent websites. I’m not sure what kind of solution to this people want.
People seem to be able to choose which wrbsite they’re signing up for when looking at Twitter, BlueSky, and Threads. It’s not like it’t that weird of an idea.
They even grok the idea that different Wordpress-based websites are different from each other!
Maybe if we stopped treating “Mastodon” as a space, and talked about it like the webhost software it is, people would understand.
You don’t have to choose. Joinmastodon.org chooses for you, and you can choose one yourself as well but only if you want to.
joinmastodon.org (the ‘official’ way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So… I guess that’s not a barrier after all.
Email was invented in 1983.
It was revolutionary, the utter example of a “killer app” that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.
Now there are 6,000,000,000 “killer” apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit “install” and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.
Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an “all in one” solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn’t want things easy.
Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.
Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there’d be a flood.
Misskey has a more similar UI to Twitter, and it can’t even get noticed by fediverse users.
But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you’re a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).
For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.
In what regards what normies would use of the featureset, they are identical tho - pretty much everything is identical these days. Log in, go to your timeline / flood / jeep / whatever, click “post new”, copy-paste a meme, hit toot / blarg / weep / whatever. There. Done.
99% of people use the exact same 1% of the features of a service.
Just log onto mastodon.social and be done with it. That’s the one that will still be running until the they turn out the lights on the service, I figure. And then go kick in a buck or two a month on Patreon to help defray development and server costs. (Not being the product is worth a donation by itself, I figure.)
Yeah, things requiring choosing a instance like, say, email, are doomed to fail
Not really. I mean, sure it’s the same concept, but email has been getting semi-centralized between the big players now, with gmail and maybe icloud getting the largest chunk of users. That would be similar to letting users choose between .world or .ml to sign up with, which is against the fediverse principle to spread the load as wide as possible.
When you present the lowest common denominator internet user with hundreds of instances to choose from and requiring them to think further than clicking through a sign-up page, you lose user interest pretty quickly.
At least in the early days of email before gmail, hotmail, or yahoo, you would get assigned an email from your work, university, or ISP.
I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.
It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).
All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.
For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.
IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
Plus, it keeps the obnoxious “But muh follower count” fame whores and the majority of the “Why can’t this be exactly like Twitter, I want a total Twitter clone” dumb-dumbs out. They’d ruin Fediverse culture even more than the second migration wave two years ago which was so massive that those who fled back then only encountered each other on Mastodon and hardly anyone who had been in the Fediverse before then.
I’m guessing you meant this sarcastically, but you may have been right for the wrong reasons. Look at this graph, by the metric of the way the fediverse works that is a failure. Apple and Google are massively dominant because people don’t want to think about it and most just go with their phone os maker who makes them create one when setting it up, and there is no fediverse server equivalent to that.
So you are saying Mastodon won’t take off because people need to choose a server but also because having a “default” where majority will ptobably end up is bad - but this is literally the solution to the problem you mentioned
This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
Nevertheless email stays the defacto standard for business communication and has stayed intercompatible with a wide range of clients, servers and plugins. So this graph could be better but is apparently not a big issue as long as companies and unis keep running their own servers, forcing big tech to stay with the standards.
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn’t get overloaded?
You’d have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname
Honestly that’s probably the best sort of solution. A group that has some minimum standards of moderation and maintenance/upgrade management plan and just evenly distribute the load as people arrive.
Then as a second phase make it easy to transfer, that way at the point the user gets comfortable they can easily swap to a better* “home” for those that care, for those that don’t, make the server choice be virtually invisible.
So what, should we have a website where you push a button and it sends you to a random instance to sign up?
Or you make it like a traditional website with an API used by people making frontends, but the backend (the database) is decentralized, just like regular websites but instead of having a bunch of servers owned by AWS it’s just a bunch of people providing storage space on their servers.
The idea would be the servers would have shared ban/block lists and similar rules so that they can share the load of having open sign ups.
Basically a coop of instances to improve on-boarding. If you join the coop then you get added to the pool of instances that get assigned normies at random.
If the authentication was federated it’d be ideal as well but I assume this would be outside the scope of AP and would cause issues if you tried to post from your mastodon.social account from mastodon.world’s server for instance.
The authentication could be another service, split from Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, … that only gave that service. The instance asks the auth server about “user@instance: password” and the server just says “OK/fail”. That or sending the user to the auth server to get a session cookie.
Just imagine the surprise when a new user is placed in hexbear or one of the porn servers.
