1

Twitter users are look for a lifeboat. They go to sign up with mastodon but the federated model is confusing and the main/original servers are full.

2

Mastodon's onboarding process literally tells users to pick a server "based on their interests". This is like being asked to pick the lunch table you will sit at for the rest of your life.

3

How do you choose a single table to sit at when we’re all the nerd, the jock, the princess, the basket case, and the criminal?

(don't @ me with "you can change servers" I know. The problem is that this is still the first thing you are being asked to do.)

4

Many servers are run by fairly centrist position admins. Some are little hobby farms with high restrictive policies. Both are, in theory, totally fine and compatible with the fediverse.

5

I highly recommend this recent @lawfare podcast where @qjurecic, @arozenshtein, and @klonick dig into the nitty gritty of decentralized social media, mastodon, and how this edge-case server situation could work just fine over time.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-decentralized-social-media-and-great-twitter-exodus

6

But users don’t know this or understand "federated." They are just being told to pick a server. So someone who does a lot of art is like “fine, I’ll reduce my personality to “artist” and choose… mastodon dot art”. Sounds reasonable, right?

Then they hit the rules…

7

In this case a user got banned for posting… Goya’s La maja desnuda… on an art server.

Now, to be fair, the rules for that server are clear! But the problem is that the reasonble expectation is that posting goya on a server branded as “the mastodon art server” should be ok.