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Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦's posts Post Back to profile
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Dave Rahardja (he/him)

@rysiek Counterpoint: Choosing instances is one of the main pain points that cause migrating users to abandon Mastodon, and it’s one of the hostile parts of migrating to Mastodon.

People *should* be encouraged to join a big instance by default so they can get onboarded quickly. They can always move their account to another instance once they get familiar with the system.

Moderation is an issue that mastodon dot social needs to grapple with. Luckily, they are a business and can raise funds/donations/volunteers for moderation.

14 May 2023 at 19:25 | Wall-to-wall | Open on sfba.social
7 comments
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@drahardja

> People *should* be encouraged to join a big instance by default so they can get onboarded quickly.

Yes, but they are encouraged to join *the* big instance. We can have a better onboarding process without creating a single point of failure in the network.

14 May 2023 at 19:44 | Open on mstdn.social
Dave Rahardja (he/him)

@rysiek What’s an example of a better process?

We tried having instance directories broken down by region/interest/affinity, and it just confused people.

Joining a massive server is actually a *very good* thing for newcomers, because Fediverse search *sucks* for finding anything outside one’s server. A huge pool of users on a server makes it more likely that people will find someone interesting to follow.

The only other alternative I can think of that doesn’t degrade the onboarding experience is to designate a known group of good servers as “primary instances” that have sufficient size, and also agree to a code of moderation and conduct. The app can then onboard people randomly to one of the instances in the group. This is likely even more complex and bureaucratically/politically difficult to maintain than making sure the one big server has enough moderators.

@rysiek What’s an example of a better process?

We tried having instance directories broken down by region/interest/affinity, and it just confused people.

Joining a massive server is actually a *very good* thing for newcomers, because Fediverse search *sucks* for finding anything outside one’s server. A huge pool of users on a server makes it more likely that people will find someone interesting to follow.

14 May 2023 at 20:02 | Open on sfba.social
Dave Rahardja (he/him)

@rysiek Or you know, the Fediverse can get off its high horse and make search actually functional. I understand that some people don’t want to be found, but even when you *want* to be found it’s way too hard for people to find you.

14 May 2023 at 20:04 | Open on sfba.social
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@drahardja and this is also happening, slowly. There are quite a few attempts at making a search thing that respects people's preferences and asks for consent.

14 May 2023 at 20:12 | Open on mstdn.social
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@drahardja have a dozen large-ish instances selected randomly as "default" each time a person needs that while signing up, instead of a single gigantic one.

Ideally, some of the instances would not be run by Mastodon-the-company.

That way the load and the responsibility spreads. New people still end up on large-ish, vibrant instances. But neither of them becomes the single-point-of-failure, too-big-to-defederate problem for the rest of fedi.

14 May 2023 at 20:06 | Open on mstdn.social
Dave Rahardja (he/him)

@rysiek That’s fine. But until the list of acceptable large instances is established, onboarding to mastodon dot social is a perfectly fine flow for today in my view.

But the problem of defederation remains. Say there are a dozen large instances that hold 80% of the Fedi population. Will your server *actually* be able to defederate from any of them? When a major instance is made of 75% regular people and 25% Nazis, but account for 7% of the total Fedi population, you can’t defederate from them unless the other 11 major instances *also* do so—your instance would stand to lose *way* more than the major instance when you defederate, because your instance receives a lot of non-problematic traffic from the major instance. Your threat of defederation will have zero consequence to the major instance.

The threat of defederation only works among peers who need each other equally for survival. We need better tools to deal with bad actors on very large instances.

@rysiek That’s fine. But until the list of acceptable large instances is established, onboarding to mastodon dot social is a perfectly fine flow for today in my view.

But the problem of defederation remains. Say there are a dozen large instances that hold 80% of the Fedi population. Will your server *actually* be able to defederate from any of them? When a major instance is made of 75% regular people and 25% Nazis, but account for 7% of the total Fedi population, you can’t defederate from them unless...

14 May 2023 at 20:25 | Open on sfba.social
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@drahardja

> That’s fine. But until the list of acceptable large instances is established, onboarding to mastodon dot social is a perfectly fine flow for today in my view.

Based on the size of m.s, I disagree.

> We need better tools to deal with bad actors on very large instances.

That's also true.

14 May 2023 at 20:27 | Open on mstdn.social
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