Aral BalkanApr 21, 2023

Dear @Gargron,

Please reevaluate your decision to incentivise centralisation on mastodon.social in the official app.

This is the sort of design a VC-funded startup would implement, not a non-profit acting in the interests of a healthy commons.

I’m sure you don’t want mastodon.social to become mini-Twitter and you don’t want to become mini-Musk.

That’s not how we win this.

More instances, not larger instances is the key.

https://mastodon.ar.al/@feditips@mstdn.social/110233282943673558

#decentralisation #fediverse #staySmall

Fedi.Tips (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image The official Mastodon app is doing something new which is potentially very dangerous to the existence of Mastodon and the Fediverse. The official Mastodon app now prompts users to join mastodon.social by default, when previously it prompted them to pick a server. If you're new this may sound harmless, but let me explain. The entire point of this place is to be a social network spread out on as many servers as possible (the reasons are here: https://fedi.tips/why-is-the-fediverse-on-so-many-separate-servers/). (1/6)

Mastodon 🐘
Show threadTroed SångbergApr 21, 2023

@aral @Gargron Actually, when combining this decision with the recent trademark one of not allowing other instances to be named *.mastodon.* there might be a case for questioning Gargron's motives here.

... but I think this is the right move to enable frictionless signups. However, it's now critically important to implement the one-click _complete_ account migration between servers as well.

Basically mastodon.social needs to encourage users to move on from spawn.

#Mastodon

Show threadBenjaminApr 21, 2023

@troed @aral @Gargron I agree. Though as nefarious as both those decisions can appear, I think it's clearly about trying to reduce the friction for new users - even for the trademark changes. The biggest complaints during November last year were about picking servers and people ending up on 'mastodon' urls that aren't moderated.

So I can empathize with the intention here.

Show threadMr. Teatime

@BenjaminNelan
wouldn't a better (though harder-to-implement...) way be to have some sort of instance suggestion engine?
You give it some keywords and what's important to you and it gives you some instances and picks one at random if you're unsure which one to use.

I spent days choosing an instance, and of course that should be made easier. But we all know how immensely powerful defaults are -- this could go quite wrong.

@troed @aral @Gargron

May 4, 2023 at 11:23pmWeb
Show threadBenjaminMay 5, 2023

@Mr_Teatime @troed @aral @Gargron Definitely. Someone shared this screenshot on GitHub and I think something like it (but with a roulette system to change the second screen so it doesn't start on .social) would be waaay better.

Having said that - I still don't know what a typical user's experience of this would be.

*Link to the github post by mattcoxonline: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/1023#issuecomment-1517563854

[BUG] App onboarding is directing new users to join mastodon.social by default · Issue #1023 · mastodon/mastodon-ios

Is there an existing issue for this? I have searched the existing issues Current Behavior With the current setup, the app strongly implies users should just join mastodon.social, with a harder-to-r...

GitHub