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Comment by ajayyy | Hacker News Reader

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...

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