I’m so confused!
At first @film_girl dismisses worries about defaulting to mastodon.social as “drama and virtue signaling”.
Then she says that migrating from mastodon.social to elsewhere has a big cost because you “can’t take your posts with you.”
Well, this is why mastodon.social shouldn’t be set as the default server to join: stuff like full text search aren’t supported on it, while that feature is supported on other servers.
This concern isn’t virtue signalling.
@atomicpoet My knowledge of her is entirely based on her appearances on Twit. Most of the time I tend to agree with her opinions, so I definitely do respect her.
As far as I can tell, she's been a very heavy used of twitter for a long time, and when read in that context, the comments makes sense. The flaw in the reasoning is obvious to someone who has been here for a long time, but I can see the frustration from someone who is used to the birdsite.
I mean, of course it makes onboarding easier if the mobile application defaults to m.s. No even the staunchest of Fediverse fanboys (fedibros?) would disagree with that. It's not a good thing for the Fediverse as a whole though.
My personal idea for a while has been to somehow make it really easy to create a fork of, say, Tusky that is branded for your instance. Then if someone wants to join jorts.horse, they go to the appstore and download the jorts.horse application. This would have the additional benefit of aligning with a rather large group of people who can't really tell the difference between a mobile application and a website.
@loke @atomicpoet This is about what I see as the incongruity of people claiming they want new users and then bikeshedding or outright brigading any attempt to create a better onboarding experience.
I actually like your idea of customized clients for different servers. In my opinion, the actual servers should also be doing a better job of advertising themselves to communities/potential new users. I don’t think that solves the general onboarding flow issue, but I like the idea.
@film_girl @atomicpoet I actually thought about it first from a practical perspective, because in order to get push notifications working effectively you need a dedicated client (since the client needs an application key, and having the user manually enter the key is a really terrible user experience).
After that, I noticed there are a lot of other benefits too. Perhaps there is room for a service that maintains the custom clients for multiple instances (ensuring updates are pushed etc). Perhaps something for @mastohost ?
Chris Trottier
Elias Mårtenson
Christina Warren