@FediTips I feel like when people ask for randomly assigned servers, there's a strange forgetfulness about which specific problem the default server was meant to solve.

Among people who signed up in 2022, the biggest reason (by far!) why people involuntarily left – that is, wanted to keep using Mastodon but failed to – was that they changed phones or browsers or just wanted to sign in on another device, and couldn't because they didn't know what server they were on.

@FediTips We can't be telling people “don't worry too much about all that server stuff for now” and also “oh you don't know if your account was on mstdn.social or mas.to, then you're just outta luck sorry”.

We also know that asking fedi newcomers to pick their own server does not work. Your suggestion addresses this point.

My conclusion is that having a default server for all newbies (not invited by a friend) is the best practical approach. Somewhere people can get their bearings.

@UlrikeHahn @julian

Exactly. The solution is obvious, there are many servers with similarly reliable track records, promote one of those.

This is something I continue to think about a lot. I thought changing the default was a bad decision at the time and haven't changed my mind! It's not just the centralization aspects of it; it's also that (based on retention rates) most people don't have a good experience on .social -- so they wind up leaving fedi.

Rotating the default doesn't seem to me like it would address the :"good experience" aspect of the problem. For most people who are looking for a Twitter-like experience, .social's as good an approximation as anywhere else in fedi -- not great, but other instances aren't any better. And for people who are looking for a local community that aligns with their interests or geography, they're not going to find it on other largeish open-registration instances (and it doesn't make sense to have anything but a largesish open-registration instance as the default).

@julian
@FediTips @UlrikeHahn

Approaches that might work better involve integrating a good instance picker into the signup process, or an onboarding flow that treats the initial instance as a "starter instance", a base for exploring that makes it easy to move to another instance. Realistically though it's not clearly how likely it is that Mastodon gGmbH will prioritize the work that's needed to support either of these -- which isn't an argument against pushing for them, just that we should be looking for other alternatives as well.

In general it seems to me that might be better to focus our efforts in terms of making it easier to join communities in fedi as a whole, not just Mastodon. For many people something other than a Mastodon-based instance may well be a better choice. Of course that still leaves the problem of people who search for "mastodon", or have read an article about Mastodon and followed the links to either the Mastodon app or joinmastodon ... but I don't know how to address those without Mastodon gGmbH's cooperation,

@julian @FediTips @UlrikeHahn

And actually I'd go farther and say it might be better to focus on community-led alternatives to commercial social networks in general -- not just fedi. For people looking for a US-focused, Black-centric microblogging experience, Blacksky might well be the best option today (and as Northsky becomes more real, that's likely to be a good option for a North American-focused 2SLGBTQIA+-centric microblogging experience). For people looking for a Palestinian-friendly photo/video-sharing app, Upscrolled might be a good option even though it's not decentralized.

@julian @FediTips @UlrikeHahn

@thenexusofprivacy

I feel that its worth pointing out in these conversations that nobody starts new servers anymore. Its hard (to measure kinda impossible now since fedidb removed the 'first seen' statistic, and server age does not show up in nodeinfo), but virtually no new servers have been started since 2024 that have gotten over 1k mau, I think it was like 4 total (this spring when the stat was still available)

@julian @FediTips @UlrikeHahn