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.
Also, we have to set out the metric for success.
Is our goal to have 100 million accounts on mastodon.social while every other server only has one account?
If that happened, I believe Mastodon would be a failure as a decentralized project.
Mastodon’s success isn’t that 11 million people use it. It’s that it’s part of a network of 24,569 nodes.
The problem is—and I can’t stress this enough—that certain people just want a Twitter replacement.
They’re not looking long term. They’re not considering future implications on network infrastructure. They’re not foreseeing that a temporary solution could potentially become permanent.
The goal here isn’t just to get everyone off Twitter, it’s to destroy Big Social.
And how to do that? Decentralize!
But if you re-centralize on one server, the Fediverse is as good as dead.
If your intent is to push people off Twitter towards mastodon.social, then Twitter has won.
Elon musk has a net worth of $174B.
And mastodon.social has a tiny sliver of $300,000 a year.
If Mastodon is re-centralized, it is in a fight that it cannot win. It just takes Elon Musk to buy it outright for the game to be over.
But if Mastodon does what it does best—decentralization—then it will win because Mastodon *cannot* be bought!
Some people might believe that decentralization is mere idealism, but in fact it's practical.
Yes, centralization is "easy" in more ways than one.
It is easy for onboarding -- but also easy for Big Social to acquire.
Decentralization is hard for onboarding. It is also hard for Big Social to acquire.
I've alluded to this earlier today.
I think there's a happy medium between "join the default" and "choose one of 10,000 servers".
Maybe that medium is a wizard that helps people find their *best* Mastodon server.
@atomicpoet
That wizard doesn't even need to be hard. Most social apps ask some "getting to know you" questions as part of onboarding so it would feel normal for everyday users.
Importantly, it shouldn't give options - just a single best-match server. People who want a list of server options or know the server they want to join already have ways of doing that
It could be as simple as:
- Preferred language?
- Location? (or 'don't care')
- Tick some interests
On the backend, servers that are over a nominal size, have demonstrated reliability and moderation, and are open to new users can register and provide matching info. Single best-match server is returned to the user (randomised if multiple candidates)
Chris Trottier
Lindsay