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.

8

So the problem is you have these highly restrictive servers that are little fiefdoms.

Some people will be happy in them!

Many will not be!

(pictured: guy who would be very excited to run a little fiefdom less as a service and more as a power trip)

9

Again, this is all by design in the fediverse and in time this all works out.

The problem is that during this period of onboarding new users this will simply drive people away. It’s very high cognitive load for people looking to migrate from Twitter.

10

The solution?

* Mastodon needs to set up a formal governance model like Wikipedia
* Mastodon needs to change the onboarding process to promote generic instances and not subject specific petty fiefdoms (or at least subject specific servers that are relatively broad in their speech policies)

@ethanschoonover I don’t think a “centralized governance kodel” is going to work on a distributed, decentralized, international federation. That is some United Federation of Planets level of enlightenment.

On oarding can definitely be improved though, if we had a list of good, geo local* servers to choose from.

* I think “local” makes a lot of sense. Keeps the timeline close to the user. Takes the Special Interest out of it. Fewer hops to the server…