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> Not only is it hard to sign up for Mastodon I genuinely don't understand this point at all. You pick an instance – any instance, provided it's open for new u
by notpushkin 4y ago
> Not only is it hard to sign up for Mastodon
I genuinely don't understand this point at all. You pick an instance – any instance, provided it's open for new users. Then you fill out 4 fields and confirm your email. That's it, you're now a proud citizen of the Fediverse. Does it get any easier than this?
(Not trying to be toxic here or anything, just actually curious.)
- aniforprez 4y agoYes. The part where you don't have to pick an instance > provided it's open for new users This in itself is a massive point of confusion for most users. I've had all my friends and family ask me about this very point and I didn't know what to say. Especially when Elon fired everyone, literally none of the instances on the Mastodon page were accepting anyone. It's much better now but this alone confuses people into thinking they're locked into their instance. Why would my father, a retired mechanical engineer, join an infosec instance? Or my friends join a French instance when none of us are remotely French?
- Matl 4y agoIs email hard because you need to pick up an 'instance'?
- Scarblac 4y agoWell you first got one from your Internet provider, and after that there were a few huge ones (Hotmail and Gmail). I don't think most people feel they "chose" their email at all.
- corv 4y agoThis is probably how the fediverse will turn out too
- wpietri 4y agoIt was! Now we are down to a very small number of default instances for most people. I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Gmail (Fastmail ftw), but Google's ad-subsidized email really decimated the competition.
- ummonk 4y agoI must have missed the part of internet history where people were constantly banned from their emails by capricious administrators for vague ToS violations. Like we are rightly concerned about Google suspending accounts without recourse, but the rate at which they do that is still orders of magnitude lower than the personal fiefdoms known as Mastodon instances.
- smolder 4y agoThe beauty is it doesn't matter if some mastodon admin is an asshole, you can be that asshole or find someone else who isn't.
- dredmorbius 4y agoI'm not aware that this was a common practice in periods of early email adoption.
- Matl 4y ago> I must have missed the part of internet history where people were constantly banned from their emails by capricious administrators for vague ToS violations. I have friends on Mastodon for some 5+ years and this isn't really an issue. If it actually keeps happening than either the instances you're picking are run by teenagers, or you're actually engaging in some sort of a behavior that perhaps warrants a ban? Personally, am running my own instance so this is not a concern but the larger ones with good reputation tend to be mature about this. I'd recommend joining a well established instance but avoid the absolutely huge ones like mastodon.social
- notpushkin 4y agoWell. Maybe you could help them pick one?
- nightpool 4y agoHave you tried just sending them an invite link to wherever you are? Ultimately WHAT instance you choose doesn't really matter as long as you trust the admin.
- mikeryan 4y agoUltimately WHAT instance you choose doesn't really matter as long as you trust the admin. Trust the admin? Trust them how? Why? Doesn’t all of Mastodon abide by the same rules?
- smolder 4y agoThey control the server that runs the software. So you trust them with every https request, your communication, your password. You trust their javascript.
- notpushkin 4y agoThis. But more importantly, you trust their judgement when it comes to moderation and defederation. While you don't understand these issues, you can either rely on somebody else's advice for that, or join a server at random and see what happens. Unless you've joined the new Gab, you should be okay – if anything goes wrong you can just migrate to another server. As for the things you've mentioned: you shouldn't assume your communication is private anywhere on Mastodon (there's some encryption proposals, but that's a long road from now), and you definitely should use different passwords for different websites.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nomel 4y agoYou must also trust them to read you DMs: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079
- 4y ago
- dmitryminkovsky 4y ago> I've had all my friends and family ask me about this very point and I didn't know what to say. How about something like: “Mastadon is decentralized, so instead of being one centralized service, it consists of many smaller communities. You can follow anyone in community, because they’re all interconnected. Moderation happens at the community level, by people who run each community. You can join any community that is accepting new members. This is more complicated because you have to pick where you want to join, but then you don’t have to deal with Elon Musk or whoever if you don’t want to.” I haven’t joined Mastodon, but this is my understanding. Seems not that much more complicated if you’re already interested in not being locked into dealing with centralization. If you’re just looking for an alternative centralized network, then yeah this is probably confusing.
- ldjb 4y agoAnecdotal evidence suggests that people do find it too confusing and complicated. The official Mastodon website provides a list of instances, but most of them seem to be aligned to particular interests, and it's difficult to make an informed decision about which server to join.
- Off 4y agoI don't think picking the right instance matters that much, Mastodon is a federated social network, you will be able to see what everyone is posting no matter what instance you're on and you can follow people from different instances without any problem.
- aszantu 4y agoI'm just overwhelmed when I go on the mastodon start page. How am I supposed to decide for a server? And then I just close it again
- Brendinooo 4y agoI mean, people do this for email. I want email, I heard Gmail is good, so I go to Gmail’s site. The mere existence of a protocol isn’t the issue here. I think the problem is more that the protocol doesn’t have champions like your ISP/Microsoft/Google. Mastodon saying “come here then go somewhere else” isn’t good; it’d be better if there was a default option somehow. It’s a common problem with open source; I worked on Passit and we had to think about the problem when it came time to log in to the extension. We ended up saying something along the lines of “check the box if you’re not using app.passit.io”. The default choice matters a lot.
- geerlingguy 4y agoWith email, you don't go to email.com, click a sign up link, then get a list of hundreds of email providers to choose from. Also, the precedent for people looking into Mastodon is not email users looking for a more real time email client. It's Twitter users looking for Twitter on not-Twitter.com
- Veedrac 4y agoAnother key difference with email is that it's easy (the default) to find email providers that are overtly content-neutral, whereas Mastodon, for whatever reason, makes that shockingly difficult.
- boudin 4y agoJust pick one and try, there's no commitment anyway. You can access content from other servers anyway
- ummonk 4y agoIs there some way to carry over followers between addresses that I'm unaware of?
- quest88 4y agoWhy do I have to pick an instance? Why can't I sign up like I did on Twitter?
- grepfru_it 4y agoIt’s like IRC you need to pick the lowest latency server
- notpushkin 4y agoI'd say latency doesn't really matter with Mastodon, no.
- grepfru_it 4y agomy comment was in jest, mocking that mastodon is simply a glorified irc client
- notpushkin 4y agoIf that's a genuine question: don't think too much about it. Just join the same one where your friends are, pick one with a cool domain, or roll a dice or something.
- brainbag 4y agoWhen I last was looking at signing up, one of the top recommended servers was for furries. Maybe grandma discovers something about herself very late in life, but mostly likely that's going to be a hard bounce.
- kevingadd 4y ago"pick any instance" ignores that you're potentially subjecting yourself to really bad moderation, future defederation/partitioning, having your friends' posts hidden from you, or even (in the worst case) not being able to migrate your account to another instance later
- notpushkin 4y agoWhich would make sense for you later on, when you understand that bad moderation and defederation exist here. Once you understand how it works, then you can migrate to a better server if desired. > not being able to migrate your account to another instance later I've never encountered this yet. Not even heard of it. I assume this only happens if your instance defederates itself from the rest of the network?
- j1elo 4y agoBecause presumably, you also want to avoid this in the process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008165 (in short: an implicit part of the process is that no one wants to end up in an instance that closes down in a couple of years because, after all, lots of them have a bus factor of 1) The common response of "just pick an instance" is hiding quite the important decision of choosing a reliable and future-proof (within reason, i.e. that it will be still alive at least for the next 5 to 10 years) one. The choice of technology and poor optimization of the reference Mastodon implementation, doesn't help at all the case of self-hosting, either.
- dunham 4y agoWhich instance was a tricky point for me. And then suddenly one of my options wasn't accepting new members (turned out to be temporary). I now have an account that I'm not using on an instance that is semi-blocked by other instances, because of abuse/spam. And I do have an account that I actually use. I thought I had to weigh: 1. Will this instance be blocked and become useless 2. Will this instance go away because it's the altruistic hobby of someone who will be overwhelmed by users/traffic or graduate in the next year. 3. Is my content acceptable for a topical mastodon? (I'm on mathstodon, is it ok to post about cooking?) All of these can probably be hand-waved away with "you can just...", but they were a concern to me as an onboarding user.