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> The reality is people don’t want to pick their favorite community, > Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn diagrams of lots of comm

> The reality is people don’t want to pick their favorite community, > Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn diagrams of lots of communities and interests. Selecting a username can be difficult, deciding which community you want as part of your identity—even if you can change it—is too much. The act of choosing a server has kept more than a few people away from Mastodon. This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit. I like football and tech and travel, but I don't see why I would want to link my identity directly to one of these interests. And yes, I understand I can still communicate with other instances or can change my instance if needed, but the fact this even needs to be qualified is friction, especially for new non-technical users.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Mastodon project seems to be very aware of it this. I believe gargron said recently in an interview they're changing the mobile app to default to mastodon.social, and putting signing up for other instances behind another "Advanced" screen or something. https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-inter... > mastodon.social isn’t actually the default in our app. It’s just one of the top ones that shows up. However, I think that possibly going forward, we might rework the onboarding user experience into presenting a default option as well as an advanced option, where all that stuff with choosing a server would basically be hidden away from the people who get intimidated by choice.
romwell 3y ago
>This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit. I said this last time Mastodon was discussed here, and was downvoted to hell by fans of the platform. The best part is a particular subreddit being able to ban you from the entire platform because they don't like what you do in another subreddit. Thanks, but no thanks.

madeofpalk 3y ago

Mastodon project seems to be very aware of it this. I believe gargron said recently in an interview they're changing the mobile app to default to mastodon.social, and putting signing up for other instances behind another "Advanced" screen or something. https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-inter... > mastodon.social isn’t actually the default in our app. It’s just one of the top ones that shows up. However, I think that possibly going forward, we might rework the onboarding user experience into presenting a default option as well as an advanced option, where all that stuff with choosing a server would basically be hidden away from the people who get intimidated by choice.

romwell 3y ago

>This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit. I said this last time Mastodon was discussed here, and was downvoted to hell by fans of the platform. The best part is a particular subreddit being able to ban you from the entire platform because they don't like what you do in another subreddit. Thanks, but no thanks.