Welcome new people!
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The reason networks become run by bad people is precisely because they are centralised and easy to take over.
The Fediverse is hard to take over when it's spread out on many servers, but easy to take over if it is on one huge server.
Mastodon.social is by far the largest server, already on 20% and rising. The more mastodon.social grows, the more the Fediverse is in danger.
If we don't think about the dangers now, it will become really difficult to deal with them in the future.
I get all of that.
But also, my first Fedi account was on mastodon dot online. My next one was on counter dot social. That didn't work, so I went to mastodon.sdf dot org. They were having capacity problems, so I went to tech dot lgbt and infosec dot exchange. And then I found out it wasn't all that hard to host your own, and now I run a copy of Cortex Implant's fork.
There's a lot to be said about all of this, but we need to be real: onboarding to Fedi is atrocious, and the doom and gloom about big servers and everything just makes this seem overwhelming.
"Welcome to Fedi! Your first server doesn't matter, pick one you like, you can migrate! Make some friends! Be kind!"
That's more the vibe I wish I'd first encountered.
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I get all of that.
But also, my first Fedi account was on mastodon dot online. My next one was on counter dot social. That didn't work, so I went to mastodon.sdf dot org. They were having capacity problems, so I went to tech dot lgbt and infosec dot exchange. And then I found out it wasn't all that hard to host your own, and now I run a copy of Cortex Implant's fork.
There's a lot to be said about all of this, but we need to be real: onboarding to Fedi is atrocious, and the doom and gloom about big servers and everything just makes this seem overwhelming.
"Welcome to Fedi! Your first server doesn't matter, pick one you like, you can migrate! Make some friends! Be kind!"
That's more the vibe I wish I'd first encountered.
"Welcome to Fedi! Your first server doesn't matter, pick one you like, you can migrate! Make some friends! Be kind!"
That isn't what new people are told any more. They are told to sign up on mastodon.social on both the official app and the official website.
The result is people think they have to sign up on mastodon.social and it is taking up an ever-larger chunk of the Fediverse.
If it grows to over 50%, anyone with enough money will be able to take over most of the network.
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"Welcome to Fedi! Your first server doesn't matter, pick one you like, you can migrate! Make some friends! Be kind!"
That isn't what new people are told any more. They are told to sign up on mastodon.social on both the official app and the official website.
The result is people think they have to sign up on mastodon.social and it is taking up an ever-larger chunk of the Fediverse.
If it grows to over 50%, anyone with enough money will be able to take over most of the network.
I get it. And this is a problem that needs to be addressed with big accounts, and not every single new user.
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I get it. And this is a problem that needs to be addressed with big accounts, and not every single new user.
No, it's the percentage of active accounts that matters when taking over a network.
If mastodon.social keeps growing, in a few years we will end up in exactly the scenario we are seeing right now with Bluesky and the one we saw a few years ago with Twitter.
The only way to break this cycle is if people do not join the biggest server. It's a simple thing to do, the signup process etc is identical on other servers.
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p.p.s. The server mastodon.social is NOT a good place to sign up, for many different reasons (more info here: https://fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-idea-to-join-a-big-server).
If you just want one alternative, https://mas.to is a much better option. It's reliable and has been online since 2019, and doesn't suffer from the problems of mastodon.social.
If you want to choose from a wide selection of servers, there are human curated lists of well-run reliable servers at https://fedi.garden and https://joinmastodon.org/servers
If I recall correctly, the official mobile Mastodon app have users sign up on the default instance which is... as you guessed it, mastodon.social
This, doesn't help either because a lot of newcomers are most likely mobile users.
I know that this is to make it easier for newcomers, but I think it just buries the onboarding problem rather than solve it.
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If I recall correctly, the official mobile Mastodon app have users sign up on the default instance which is... as you guessed it, mastodon.social
This, doesn't help either because a lot of newcomers are most likely mobile users.
I know that this is to make it easier for newcomers, but I think it just buries the onboarding problem rather than solve it.
Yup. It's fine to suggest one good server to new people, but they need to regularly change which good server they suggest so that the growth is spread out more.
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"Welcome to Fedi! Your first server doesn't matter, pick one you like, you can migrate! Make some friends! Be kind!"
That isn't what new people are told any more. They are told to sign up on mastodon.social on both the official app and the official website.
The result is people think they have to sign up on mastodon.social and it is taking up an ever-larger chunk of the Fediverse.
If it grows to over 50%, anyone with enough money will be able to take over most of the network.
I just noticed this post now after I mentioned about the mobile app. Was it a recent change that there is a button that takes you to mastodon.social on the website?
It's been years since I was on the Fediverse, so yeah.
Either way, my point still stand. A button that takes you directly to mastodon.social, is a bad solution to onboarding and it leads to other problem like the fact that mastodon.social is really big and poses a potential threat for the Fediverse to be bought out because of it.
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p.p.s. The server mastodon.social is NOT a good place to sign up, for many different reasons (more info here: https://fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-idea-to-join-a-big-server).
If you just want one alternative, https://mas.to is a much better option. It's reliable and has been online since 2019, and doesn't suffer from the problems of mastodon.social.
If you want to choose from a wide selection of servers, there are human curated lists of well-run reliable servers at https://fedi.garden and https://joinmastodon.org/servers
@FediTips idk, why don't the mastodon.social staff see this and incentivise people to choose other servers or institute a sign up stop?
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If they've only just signed up and haven't done much yet, they can forget about their mastodon.social account and sign up again on mas.to or elsewhere. It just takes a few minutes. (Also they can recommend to friends to go on mas.to or wherever.)
If they've been on mastodon.social for a while, they can move their account elsewhere (transfer guide is at https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/).
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this kind of post...
It's better to join a small server compared to a big server.
And it's better to join a big server compared to a network run by cryptocryptofascists.
"It's a really bad idea" kind of rhetoric, and "is NOT a good place to sign up" kind of rhetoric, is actively toxic, actually.
Agreed. Suprising rhetoric to see from an account that's usually so supportive of the community.
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You don't have to use a computer to do the transfer, you can use the web version of Mastodon on your iPad by using your iPad's web browser Safari.
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@FediTips idk, why don't the mastodon.social staff see this and incentivise people to choose other servers or institute a sign up stop?
They used to do that, mastodon.social would regularly close signups and tell people to sign up on a specific other server.
They really need to go back to that.
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I just noticed this post now after I mentioned about the mobile app. Was it a recent change that there is a button that takes you to mastodon.social on the website?
It's been years since I was on the Fediverse, so yeah.
Either way, my point still stand. A button that takes you directly to mastodon.social, is a bad solution to onboarding and it leads to other problem like the fact that mastodon.social is really big and poses a potential threat for the Fediverse to be bought out because of it.
They started doing this in 2023 I think? Even worse is they do it on the official mobile app which lots of people think they need in order to use Mastodon.
It's sending people totally the wrong message by making one server dominate.
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It's not rhetoric, it's a sincere warning.
I am trying to protect the community. The community will be destroyed if everyone goes onto one server.
Saying nothing about this would be toxic.
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p.p.s. The server mastodon.social is NOT a good place to sign up, for many different reasons (more info here: https://fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-idea-to-join-a-big-server).
If you just want one alternative, https://mas.to is a much better option. It's reliable and has been online since 2019, and doesn't suffer from the problems of mastodon.social.
If you want to choose from a wide selection of servers, there are human curated lists of well-run reliable servers at https://fedi.garden and https://joinmastodon.org/servers
Help. I bridged my BlueSky account to my Kolektiva account. However, since then I've migrated my BlueSky account to BkackSky.
Do I need to repeat the Bridge?
#feditips
#introduction
@mastodonmigration
#MastodonMigration -
Help. I bridged my BlueSky account to my Kolektiva account. However, since then I've migrated my BlueSky account to BkackSky.
Do I need to repeat the Bridge?
#feditips
#introduction
@mastodonmigration
#MastodonMigrationI don't support Bluesky, sorry. You might want to ask the bridge developer?
For what it's worth, Blacksky have apparently had to do a lot of work to create their own tools etc to try to break free of Bluesky, but Bluesky was still able to delete a user from Blacksky a few days ago. The decentralisation on Bluesky seems a bit broken.
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p.p.s. The server mastodon.social is NOT a good place to sign up, for many different reasons (more info here: https://fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-idea-to-join-a-big-server).
If you just want one alternative, https://mas.to is a much better option. It's reliable and has been online since 2019, and doesn't suffer from the problems of mastodon.social.
If you want to choose from a wide selection of servers, there are human curated lists of well-run reliable servers at https://fedi.garden and https://joinmastodon.org/servers
@FediTips I am currently setting up a new account on mastodon.social and that's for all the things that post ignores, which is all the things that work worse on federated networks. For example, following hashtags does not show all posts with that hashtag on all instances, just those that your instance knows of, which counteracts the benefit of instances for certain topics. The smaller your topic, the more you are limited to the people on your instance and might be better off with a big instance.
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@FediTips I am currently setting up a new account on mastodon.social and that's for all the things that post ignores, which is all the things that work worse on federated networks. For example, following hashtags does not show all posts with that hashtag on all instances, just those that your instance knows of, which counteracts the benefit of instances for certain topics. The smaller your topic, the more you are limited to the people on your instance and might be better off with a big instance.
"following hashtags does not show all posts with that hashtag on all instances"
That's what groups are for, they show all the posts to everyone that follows them:
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse
"might be better off with a big instance."
If everyone joins the biggest instance, it will destroy the network. Mastodon.social is in danger of doing that.
If you really have to choose a large instance something like https://mas.to would be much better for the health of the network.
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"following hashtags does not show all posts with that hashtag on all instances"
That's what groups are for, they show all the posts to everyone that follows them:
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse
"might be better off with a big instance."
If everyone joins the biggest instance, it will destroy the network. Mastodon.social is in danger of doing that.
If you really have to choose a large instance something like https://mas.to would be much better for the health of the network.
@FediTips Groups are a worse way of the same problem topic-centered instances already have: They don't work as long as not enough people use them. I picked seven random groups that would interest me and six had under 100 followers, four had under 50. That's much worse than hashtags.
Regarding the dangers of buyouts etc, that's way too speculative for me. Mastodon is ridiculously small compared to all other social networks. But I mostly wanted to point out that your post ignores disadvantages.
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@FediTips Groups are a worse way of the same problem topic-centered instances already have: They don't work as long as not enough people use them. I picked seven random groups that would interest me and six had under 100 followers, four had under 50. That's much worse than hashtags.
Regarding the dangers of buyouts etc, that's way too speculative for me. Mastodon is ridiculously small compared to all other social networks. But I mostly wanted to point out that your post ignores disadvantages.
The groups on the list at the moment are brand new, the Guppe provider closed down unexpectedly a few weeks ago due to its domain being taken.
You can help the new groups get started by following what you're interested in and posting to them, that will encourage other people to take part too.
"Regarding the dangers of buyouts etc, that's way too speculative for me."
Mastodon gGmbH have already been offered VC money on several occasions (but turned it down).
