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Top-level
 > 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. 6 comments
 @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. @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. @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. > 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. |
Gregory's Server
@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.