#Pixelfed is getting talked about on TikTok as an alternative to #Instagram.
Almost every video about it has people in the comments saying "Why do I have to pick a server? What does that mean?"
Either people are just dumb beyond help, or we need to do better at onboarding people to the #fediverse.
Edit: I love the ideas and discussions this post is stirring up!
@jcrabapple the fediverse keeps putting down this issue as trivial, but in the modern world it really isn't.
The email analogy doesn't line up when the expectation of modern social media is go to one website and sign up. Not to mention the choice of identity with the different servers.
This is one of the reasons why Bluesky works. Even if AT Protocol gets federated among multiple services, when you sign up for Bluesky, the hosting server is auto selected to them.
@jcrabapple it is, quite frankly, difficult to avoid a concentration of users to a single instance when trying to reduce friction.
I believe Mastodon have done a similar thing by setting the default in the official app to mastodon.social; much to the backlash of overzealous members of the fediverse.
But that's what you need to do: provide an easy default, but also the option (for those who want it) to sign up or select a different instance.
@jcrabapple one day I'll finally collate the jumble of thoughts about this issue into a coherent post. Today is not that day :)
However, the one thing I am certain of is that this is a key barrier that prevents the general public from fully embracing the Fediverse.
The complaints about Pixelfed mirror the same issues people had with Mastodon during the many Twitter exoduses.
@jcrabapple yesterday was not that day, but apparently today is :)
https://andrewmelder.com/2025/01/16/how-the-pick-your-server.html
@hamatti @jcrabapple @andrewmelder
lol, you beat me to it!
But seriously, a whimsical tool (or several) might do the trick.
I used to take too many of those stupid quizzes back in my day.
Even now, I still care which arcane character corresponds to my birthday and I didn’t even watch season 2!
@jcrabapple @andrewmelder
Maybe as part of the signup ask new users what their primary use case will be to suggest some servers, acknowledging that many will still pick the largest and most well known instance.
Another take, accept it but make moving accounts to other servers easier so that users can spread out once they've found some communities.
one analogy i haven’t seen is “like minecraft”
minecraft players are pretty familiar with “different servers, different rules, same core mechanics”
so “like minecraft, but for twitter; what rules do you like? that’ll help you find people you like doom scrolling with”
@tychi @jcrabapple I'm not familiar with Minecraft so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the account you create on Minecraft is a centralised Microsoft based account right?
Once you create that one account, then you go and sign up to servers. So it's closer to a Discord structure than a Fediverse one.
Note: it's been a while, I don't play but my kids do occasionally and that's how I set them up previously.
@andrewmelder @jcrabapple it is microsoft owned now, but follow me back in time to the beginning
when minecraft was in development by mojang, you would pay $30 and get access to the beta, which was the client of the game that ran locally on your machine-- for lack of a better analogy, like downloading a "minecraft web browser"
by default, this connected to mojang servers, eventually sold to microsoft. There was an advanced option where you could specify connection instructions to a third party server, very much like configuring an email client over pop3/imap.
the game servers themselves were a java executable, so people generally ran them on their PCs at home and let their friends dial into them, and they'd change the configs to tune the game to what they wanted that default experience to be.
we could quite literally be doing that early minecraft architecture over here, but using fediverse servers, such as mastodon. the biggest difference is minecraft networking is relatively light compared to noisy ap chatter.
@tychi @jcrabapple ok, I'm getting flashbacks of running a Minecraft server for my son and his friends a decade or so ago. So yeah, that early networking side of things kinda resembles it.
I guess the question here is what changes need to be made to the Fediverse services to give it more mass market appeal and usability that Minecraft has now?
@andrewmelder @jcrabapple that's the question i've been exploring for a long time and the shortest answer i can give you is "convergence"
when steve announced the iphone, he really hammered it in that an "mp3 player", "a phone", and "a web browser" didn't need to be three different devices in three different pockets in our pants.
the biggest problem the ecosystem is that each fediverse "solution" only targets one aspect of the social problem, which really just leads to fragmentation.
to put it another way, meta has facebook, threads, whatsapp, instagram and all four of those are unique accounts in their system, which is fragmented due to each acquisition having technical and social debt.
to hit parity against that, there's mastodon/misskey/akkoma, signal/telegram, pixelfed/loops and people need to cognitively decide on each server and they don't all have apps in stores.
the need for simplicity is why i lean convergence. one account for all media types, more or less.
@tychi @jcrabapple hmmm. My concern is ActivityPub was designed to be adaptable to many different forms, so it almost dissuades convergence by design.
As such, the only way I see it happening is through centralisation of some sort; which also goes against what the Fediverse is meant to represent.
@andrewmelder @jcrabapple at the end of the day, activitypub is the newest phase of rss
when rss first started, it was primarily for blog text, but steve/apple figured out you could use it for podcasts. same data format, different presentation.
activitypub is the same way-- i'm of the mind it hasn't broken past being more than text and light images due to hosting costs of audio/video. the big tech players just subsidize expensive video distribution by selling data, keeping onboarding easy.
we can have a single client that's able to be this centralized piece, but unique to each of us on our devices-- that's the convergence i see, and the crux of my development research.
in my mind, the problem isn't technical, but social. how can we cover the cost of distributing entertaining videos at a rate that people are sufficiently entertained? the navigation can quite literally be by media type, "text", "audio", "video", where AP backs each feed, the problem is cost, which is a social problem.
@yuhasz01 @jcrabapple will it?
Curious of the specific benefits you propose that would persuade the general public to make the additional effort over other streamlined and centralised services?
Try more privacy, control over your account, less creepy garbage in your feeds, less unrequested ads, less surveillance economics practices, more focused and quality sharing and communications with people you select, etc etc.
Let's go through them from a mass market P.O.V
- More privacy: they don't care
- Control over your account: they don't care
- Less creepy garbage in your feeds: they might care but depending on what you define as creepy and what you actually see in your feed (opposed to what other people see)
- Less ads or surveillance: they don't care
- better sharing and comms with people you care about: again maybe but people don't leave Instagram yet despite this.
@yuhasz01 @jcrabapple I personally like these benefits (it's why I'm here), but by the numbers if these things were important for the general public, Meta would not be the biggest social media company in the world.
They have consistently done everything against these goals for two decades, yet they are still the biggest player.
@andrewmelder @yuhasz01 @jcrabapple
🧵 Maybe try speaking to old ladies and other folks who hate trying to understand technology-- like me.
Before joining #Mastodon, I did not know what an "instance" was, nor did I care. My husband is a Network Engineer, so I understood a bit about "servers." But I made three attempts before successfully creating a Mastodon account. I nearly gave up!
Only after I had been on Mastodon for a long time did I realize WHY things are spread out in the #Fediverse and the many benefits to #federation .
Why should I have to take a computer class or learn to be a computer expert just to chat with people? I don't need to do that to send emails, or texts, or to post on corporate platforms. I shouldn't have to speak like a computer programmer just to talk to people.
Make the Fediverse "Granny Friendly." Don't ask me to pick something when I don't even know what it is, or choose between options when I don't know why I should choose one over another...
@andrewmelder @yuhasz01 @jcrabapple
Also: Don't ask me to choose between instances if you don't tell me what each of them are and how they're different. (Ahem, #Pixelfed -- which gave me NO clues about the different instances when I signed up last night. My only option was to pick one of the icons, and sign in there. So I chose the largest one, and assumed I could migrate later on-- Yes, this old techno-phobe has learned how to do that, too, with time! LOL)
Even when googling, I could find no list to say anything about the instances. When signing up for Mastodon, there was a list showing what each instance specialized in or most appealed to. Did I like humor? Science? Music? Did I want to focus on politics? I could see which Mastodon/Fediverse server to sign up with for that.
But not so for Pixelfed. That needs to be addressed.
Maybe @FediTips or someone at @pixelfed could make a linked list of them, with some description abt what their focuses are? That would be nice.
@AnneTheWriter1 @andrewmelder @yuhasz01 @jcrabapple @pixelfed
I run a website at https://fedi.garden which lists well-run instances in exactly that way. There are just a few from Pixelfed at the moment (https://fedi.garden/tag/pixelfed/), but I'll try to add more.
Pixelfed's official website https://pixelfed.org also has an instance list at https://pixelfed.org/servers
At the moment though, they tend to be mostly general purpose servers, possibly because Pixelfed is newer than Mastodon?
@FediTips @andrewmelder @yuhasz01 @jcrabapple @pixelfed
Thank you! You have always been an excellent source for Fediverse information.
Identify a small number of good, general-purpose servers and offers a random one of these up as a good default choice for new users. Maybe weight the random choice a little towards the less populated servers.
Other, more specialized servers, can be listed as alternatives for people looking for specific communities or interests.
@andrewmelder @jcrabapple Maybe it's this expectation that needs to change.
Centralized social media is slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past, and choosing where you decide to store your social data will become the norm.
@richarddegenne @jcrabapple I don't mean to come across as dismissive with my response, because in general I also hope for the norm you describe.
However, the proof time and time again is this: the majority of people do not care about control of their social data or if it's centralised.
They care about the experience and connecting easily with people they want to. The technology of how is not of significance.
@andrewmelder @jcrabapple As of right now, absolutely. And it is my belief that it should not be the case.
When people are choosing an ISP, they are used to going to different providers, comparing speeds, pricing, offers, and it's not "more difficult" than a world where you go to internet.com and sign up on a single provider.
Just because it works like this today does not mean it has to stay like that. Educate people, one at a time, until "choosing a server" is just the way of the world.
@richarddegenne @jcrabapple so the second part of this choice is the other problem no one seems to talk about: when people are forced to choose a server on the Fediverse, even if the choice is from a bunch of generic servers, they are choosing a social identity to align themselves with personally.
It becomes way more tied to you as an individual, beyond any other service like choosing an email or ISP.
@richarddegenne is it true that the median internet user compares ISPs? i’m not sure they even know what an ISP is. plenty of people i know just get wi-fi “from my apartment” and that’s as deep as their understanding goes
i think we, as tech enthusiasts, tend to overestimate how little the general population knows, or wants to know
@jcrabapple People are generally dumb (yes, even us), but I don’t think that label warrants in this case.
It is important to realize that only a select group of people “live” in this tech bubble and are comfortable in there.
For most people, tech is hard, and federated services are not as straightforward as centralized ones.
So yes, better docs and onboarding are needed.
Yeah, sorry @jcrabapple, but I agree with @mahryekuh, and others saying this.
After Musk took over Twitter, I wanted to give Mastodon another try, but with a different username. And since you can't change it, and mastodon.social was closed to new registrations at the time, I decided to run my own server instead of having to pick a different one.
And seeing some of the inter-instance "drama", I don't know, I'm pretty happy with my choice.
@jcrabapple @mahryekuh Yeah, I think it might make more sense to switch to promoting specific communities (and stop calling them servers). I've seen a few people talk about this already, and it's definitely an easier sell.
"Hey, join DMV.community! You'll be able to talk to anyone on Mastodon, Pixelfed, and many others!"
@boby_biq Yeah, the experience could still use some polishing. But honestly, I've tried Bluesky, and for post translation they just link you to Google Translate?? Where is all that money going?
@stefan @jcrabapple It’s just frustrating. All I needed is to enjoy using the platform.
when ivory finally came it was like the sun started shining and little birds chirping, gifs flying high..
My remaining wish is to get latest first when show replies under a post -or something like that so I won’t have to scroll through 100s of the same to see the newest comments.
Ps: and proper functioning QT.
Jcrabapple
Andrew Melder
Juhis
astroPug
Ev Delen
the harbinger of eternal sept
Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】
yuhasz01
AnneTheWriter
Fedi.Tips
Skjeggtroll
Nicholas
Richard Degenne
tech himbo
Benjamin Balder Bach
Marijke Luttekes
Stefan Bohacek
Just Boby
wakest ⁂
Mirko Schenk
Tamsyn Ulthara 🏳️⚧️⛧🎃🐈⬛