Mastodon improving the onboard experience is great. The wannabe fedi-police will be out in force against a default instance i’ve no doubt and I’ve already seen numerous complaints about it.
It’s not “growth for the sake of growth” or against the idea of decentralisation. It’s just a small basic change to improve the flow for new people to get people started. Good stuff.
Also quote toots coming, yay!
Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge. To make this step easier, we now have a default sign-up option that works with a server we operate. If you wish to leave or join a different server, you can do so at any time.
@tomspettigue
Eugen posted about it from the blog https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge. To make this step easier, we now have a default sign-up option that works with a server we operate. If you wish to leave or join a different server, you can do so at any time.
@gamingonlinux mastodon.social has many problems, having everyone who isn't tech savvy on one instance presents a problem, once the instance is large enough it can become impossible to defederate without losing 99% of the user base. This could become an issue for minority groups if let's say mastodon decided to allow "free political discussion" and let right-wing people, debate "trans people" on whether or not they are allowed to exist. It would be nearly impossible to deal with this behavior.
I suggest instance admin defederate them now!!!
@gamingonlinux Yeah, it's not like you're forever locked in to mastodon.social. Its *super* easy to migrate to new instances.
I started out on mastodon.social, and I've moved instances a few times.
Not too excited about quoting, but eh, maybe I'll come to appreciate it later?
@gamingonlinux I don't think onboarding is a big problem, but I do think they could have handled it in a better way.
It's also very clear that they're not really paying attention to feedback, what with this Github issue having over 400 upvotes: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/1023
Which I'm not a fan of, regardless of what the decision is. Isn't this supposed to be an open source project? Aren't our voices supposed to mean something?
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...
I do agree with @gamingonlinux that making on onboarding experience better is great! However I share the doubt that this is the right way forward. Resorting to a default mega-instance seems like a lackluster solution that's gonna backfire. I think one should've taken the problems – and I think we all know there are problems with it, just disagree on the degree – more seriously and cooked up something more well thought-through.
We don't need to pretend everything needs some majority vote, if the problems are well-known. A "vote" is a discussion-ender, it's fruitful to move on with something if all agree on voting, but it's a silencer in the face of changes that are needed.
Indeed there are a lot of problems with mastodon.social, ironically even hampering adoption of Fediverse proper because of bad/overwhelmed mods, racism, etc. – which would've been helped by "simply" using another instance. I think there are better solutions than a default instance.
As, btw, I think there are better solutions than simply adding QTs – they were left out for good reason and I think the solution space is actually big enough to find something that's no QT but fulfilling the same needs w/o, hopefully, the downsides. But alas, we gave up on that one as well.
@ljrk @gamingonlinux QT is fine. It's a feature I was sorely missing as a Twitter migrant - it lets me share my thoughts and/or additional context to my followers while boosting a post. Imo, the issue comes with the people that use the feature; a lack of proper moderation was what made QRTs bad on birdsite.
Otherwise yeah everything you say is valid. Improving onboarding is never bad, I just think it could have been done better
@flit @gamingonlinux I had a discussion back a few months with I think @mekkaokereke where there were some ideas floating around, e.g., sub-commenting+combined boosts that both allowed to add context while giving the original author more control/visibility about how/where their toot is framed and displayed.
Well, that idea's dead in the water now I guess :/
It's always daunting when there is a complex problem space and people only argue^Wshout for/against a pre-existing suboptimal solution instead of acknowledging both merits and cons of it and trying to come up with something better.
@gamingonlinux The issue I see with auto-signups to the biggest instance isn't with decentralization directly, but with the moderation issues that instance has been having since long before now.
I've heard of several instances taking the nuclear option of defederating M.S due to harassment of their users and the lack of moderating them on M.S's behalf. If their moderation was lacking then, encouraging rapid growth of their population won't improve it.
Hey folks, based on some moderation reports that suggested mastodon.social was basically completely unmoderated and the volume of really awful accounts we've seen from there I defederated the instance yesterday. Since then folks pointed out that several RPG companies or significant folks are there, so I've re-federated with them. I don't think there's an easy answer here, but I'm going to try to figure out how to handle a large instance with some important accounts but a lot of awful ones too.
> Also quote toots coming, yay!
This will end up bad.
We should cure people from twitter degeneracy, not supporting it!
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