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Comment by DirkH | Hacker News Reader

It is stunning to me that Mastadon still hasn't come up with a simple onboarding solution to sidestep the issue of "instances"

I completely agree with you. Mastadon even loses techies like me due to the decision fatigue of having to pick instances before I can even start exploring.

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What’s shocking is everyone can wrap their heads around regular country post offices, emails, in general distinct entities interacting, but lose their minds when you tell them about mastodon.

Just tell them it’s email for twitter. Just like you can interact with anyone who’s email address you know so too with their mastodon handle. The only real difference is that everyone also publishes all their “emails” for anyone to see instead of sending them privately.

As someone who has heard of Mastodon but not really interacted with it, that's a really helpful metaphor!

Oh please. The consolidation has affected email equally to the point where "email" is synonymous to "gmail". No one is signing up for email by searching for other email clients, setting up SMTP and whatnot. They go to Google, search for "email" click on the sign up link to "gmail" and carry on. I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature

Unless Mastodon has similarly sensible, no frills defaults, it is doomed to the fringes. Normal users are not going to have the patience to look at a bunch of instances and make a choice that they really don't understand. Make a large instance for everyone and make it the default

> I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature

You're completely ignoring the corporate world, which may outweigh consumer email use (dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me.)

G Suite isn't even close to a monopoly, and I imagine there's large IT departments at anti-cloud corpos specifically for managing all their emails.

It's like, consumers don't know or care if they're using Linux, but they would definitely care if everything using it went away. Consumers aren't where Linux "won" either, it won on servers.

All this to say email is more centralized than it should be, but its decentralization is absolutely still important for its continued relevance.

If you take away the decentralization and Gmail were to become its own private messaging service, it would have the momentum to carry on for a while. But it would surely die. 5 years, maybe 10. But I have no doubt it would suffocate itself.

I know lawyers and founders who have Hotmail and AOL.com addresses, so I'd jump ship day one. One mass "Hey guys Gmail is bad here's my new email" to all my contacts (or as much as spam prevention allows...) and done.

I didn't say 1% of all email users are not gmail users. I said 1% know about its federated nature. Even if email allows for different email domains and there are entire departments are dedicated to manage domain emails, I thoroughly doubt even these people would even understand that this is what makes email "federated" or even call it that

gmail isn't a monopoly because of how they handle email. gmail is a monopoly because the common user doesn't know the difference most of the time

>I said 1% know about its federated nature.

I mean, they may not know, but they'd understand a high level overview.

I on gmail can email someone at hotmail, outlook, yahoo, or any custom business email. I can do this because email is a common protocol that is shared amongst dozens of servers. That isn't deep technical knowledge, but they would get the gist of federation there if I segway'd to it.

>gmail isn't a monopoly because of how they handle email. gmail is a monopoly because the common user doesn't know the difference most of the time

Even my Grandma has a Yahoo account. She knows my Gmail address and can send me messages. I don't think Gmail is as synonymous with email as you think.

also as mentioned above: some 80% of people with a business email address probably knowws that there are more addresses than "@gmail.com".

You’re missing the point. Just like most people have no idea how their post office functions, really. And most people have no idea how their email service functions except at the most basic level, they understand enough to use it. For most nontechnical people I know, they’re more likely to be using yahoo or aol vs gmail.

You are missing MY point. If you put front and center how your social media is "federated" and then add friction in the signup process by asking them to "pick a server" then it's DOA for anyone except most tech users

From what I've seen, they've significantly changed their signup process to push unauthenticated users to a default feed and to create an account by default on their largest instance which is a massive win for getting new accounts. This is a good change

The name itself is a problem. It sounds heavy, ponderous, and prehistoric.

This also displays where the federation that mastodon uses, has difficulty.

If a rural post office closes (they do from time to time), unless you're using a very old "rural route" style postal address ( https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28c2_021.htm ), your address doesn't change when a post office changes.

Additionally, if you happen to live next to a person with unsavory views, the post office will still deliver all your mail to you.

When a mastodon instance shuts down unexpectedly (it also happens from time to time), you need to start up a new identity somewhere else and your address changes.

If your neighbor on an instance becomes problematic you may find that your messages aren't visible to others anymore as other instances start defederating from the instance that you are on.

For situations where people say "well host your own...", for most of the populace, this is similar in practicality as staffing your own post office.

What I can't wrap my head around is trying to read a conversation with some bits silently missing because some parts haven't (yet) synced to my server. It makes it impossible to use Mastodon for anything serious, as there's too great a risk of talking at cross purposes due to missing context. (Or, simply repeating something someone else has already said.)

They did. The mobile app by default signs you up on mastodon.social now

Is this not a centralizing measure? This is where things fundamentally break down for me.

No it’s not in my opinion because it’s a default setting

I am curious, why don't you like centralization? It seems like no matter the crowd, people need centralization. Atleast to begin with, then they are ok breaking off into subgroups. Like what happened with reddit. You start on the popular frontpage. Then the longer you stay, the more subreddits you start using.

historically speaking, I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket. We've seen sites rise and fall, some fall from grace and others outright shut down. And often times, no one is prepared enough to move. In many cases they may not even care about the lost knowledge and move on in life. Sometimes I do care tho and I spend way too much of my time trying to find any data hoarders who may have also cared. This is a huge hassle.

So in theory, a decentralized network should solve this. If one part goes down, you host another instance, migrate, and have that new instance rise, with minimal impact to your community since all of this is happening under the surface. They may change their URL, but they will still feel like they are on their favorite site, hopefully with most of the people intact.

>Like what happened with reddit

Yes, a great example of why I don't like centralization, given current times. While I support the blackout, if there was some important bookmark to a piece of content that I needed, I may not be able to access it. If reddit was federated, I coudl simply clone those important posts to a new instance ahead of the blackout and keep on keeping on. Maybe have some way to redirect the URLs as well (I'm not too versed in how configurable these instances are).

[false quote narrative removed, I had names mixed up]

Not in the slightest. You see, you can use mastodon.social for exactly as long as it suits you to do so.

If you're the type who will simply never wrap your head around federation, stay there. Sorted.

If you figure it out eventually, you can take all of your content and migrate it to whatever new instance you like. No hassle, no corporation making it difficult because they are trying to keep you coralled in their silo. The flagship instance would absolutely love to help you move off their servers while keeping every bit of your data.

Has this addressed all of your concerns?

> If you're the type who will simply never wrap your head around federation, stay there. Sorted.

So, 99% of users will stay there, and another 0.9% for the network effect of interacting with the 99%. Right?

I dunno, the experiment is in motion. The hope is always that people will open their minds and learn the concepts. But I feel just as lost watching a sports event as a lot of folks apparently feel picking an instance, so I get it.

Edit: the thing is, even the totally incurious might run up against a rule they don't like, or they might notice that every post that is relevant to them ends with @sexy.gazebos and get curious what that means. I am 100% positive that that curiosity plus a 100IQ is enough to get the idea.

I have to ask, though: if 99% of users do stay on mastodon.social (I'm still there, for instance) or whatever ends up being the main Lemmy instance, is that actually a problem in some way, which is not a much bigger problem on Reddit?

Sounds that way. If nothing else, if the main network does collapse, you can make instructions for how to get people to jump off that instance.

Much smoother migration than this Reddit issue here.

It's one of those battles you can't win: Ask people to choose up front, new users balk. Assign a default, the existing crowd absolutely riots about centralization, and half of everyone doesn't even notice the change anyways.

The difference there is, they're wrong about it being a centralizing move, because the user retains the right to move on at any time now or in the future. It's just a matter of continuing the conversation until it sinks in, I had to do it with a very forward-thinking friend who I only learned in that conversation, had no clue about FOSS stuff at all. I really did have it in my head that everyone who got on the internet also figured out how the internet works just by being here, but of course not, they've been using platforms that protect them from the real internet...

They lost a techie like me when their main web app refuses to even display without JS. And I say that as a JS guy. Open stuff with aims as big as Mastodon should work on as many devices as possible.

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