I've been saying this from the go: users don't need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.

What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn't add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn't a feature.

Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes "do you want to see Threads or nah?", which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.

Here’s another way: stop referring to everything “Twitter-like” as Mastodon. Stop referring to everything “Reddit-like” as Lemmy. Those are both client platforms through which one can access ActivityPub content.

Conflating the platform with the provider with the protocol with the content is what’s confusing people.

I like this, though I will say I acutally prefer the playful choice idea. Not Hogwarts for me particular, but in general.

2. 2 is good.

Decentralization doesn't matter until it does. Recruiting people to your specific Mastodon instance is ideal and simple. All they need out of the decentralization concept is to know they can't be screwed if Elon takes over their instance.

I'm curious about the state of account migrations right now. Ideally it should be super easy and it should strengthen the Fediverse if people can hope platforms with ease when an admin isn't behaving as they should.

One technical challenge might be deletion

• Admins need to be able to delete or quarantine harmful / illegal content
• You can't move instances if an admin suddenly comes along and deletes everything

Could on-device backups be a thing? The collective userbase takes up a lot of storage, but each individual person probably doesn't upload more than their phone can store. It might also incentivize them to not spam large files

If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.

I think the "migration" process needs more work. If you want to hop homeservers, you're going to lose your whole post history and all your followers. That's what keeps people stuck, more than the sign-up process itself.

There's still nothing like awesome lemmy instances that shows a server's blocking and blocked by count?

That's the biggest hurdle for me, there's no guarantee who you want to follow won't be blocked by your or their BOFH.

So... Am I missing something or are you suggesting an oligopoly, elected by a monopoly?

I think it should be like joining a mining pool, if you create a server you don't have admin privileges like they exist here at the moment, you're added to the pool of machines that stores info and users don't choose a server at all, the servers communicate between themselves to make sure all info is backed up on at least three machines.

From the front end it looks like any equivalent private social media, one website for everything. On the back end side the servers are all over the place instead of in a couple data centers.

Server owners could decide to ban certain communities from storing info on their server, but that wouldn't delete the community, it would just rely on being hosted elsewhere (hence the triple backup at all times) and users would be responsible for curating their own feed.

It would solve the issue of having to switch server if you disagree with the admin's decision and would make the experience much more user friendly. Each new server would improve the stability of the whole network by taking part of the load and making sure that if one server is down, others have the same content available so no user can tell that there's something wrong happening behind the scene.