I'm replying here to the most recent blog post about Mastodon by @Gargron that focuses on features dealing with abuse and harassment, as well as his recent Medium interview.
Those blog topics - along with growing awareness of the dangers associated with corporate-owned social media - are the driving force behind the next wave of people joining the fediverse. Of which I am one.
I hope my comments are taken in good faith, because I'm not looking for a Twitter clone; but I seek an alternative that encompasses a wider range of people than I'm finding on Mastodon.
Many try the fediverse and wander away again because they struggle to adapt. Blaming them for being scared to try new things, or unwilling to shed their large groups on other sites misses several crucial points.
The first point is the assertion that "anyone can create an instance and join the federation" and set it up as they want.
This should be "may", not "can". Most people do not have the tech skills, time or resources to do so.
It's like saying anyone can make their own bread. You need, at minimum, ingredients, a recipe and a stove - or you need to have a farm and grow your own before creating an open fire.
Many people looking for social media alternatives don't know how to create an instance, they do not have the time to learn how to do so, and many of them use phones to access the net.
The unfortunate corollary to this barrier to entry is that those who do have the skills dominate the fediverse, which makes tech issues naturally dominate the discourse. People talk about their interests.
For those newbies testing the waters, however, this makes the acceptance and integration chasm wider.
The second point is content. I've brushed on it previously, but my point here is that the fediverse is a much closer fit with Twitter than many other sites.
There's a wonderful array of fascinating links from both respected mainstream media and brilliant independent studies here. There's also a whole lot Facebook-style status updates.
People are more than willing to give up the endless pontificating or drivel from verified accounts. They're not so keen to give up the funny.
The third issue is culture. This is more prickly because it goes to the heart of what I think needs to be addressed if the fediverse is going to become the way forward for social media or remain a tech-heavy niche.
The avowed intent - to move away from the user abuse and mal fides of corporate entities such as Twitter - has my full backing.
But the baby's in danger of being thrown out with the bathwater.
Unless there is a more welcoming culture this will be MySpace without ever having been MySpace, and the open-source effort to wrest the initative from commercial interests will be an interesting footnote to history.
That welcoming culture can take several forms:
1. Some sort of "noticeboard" or collection of toots that newcomers are immediately directed to in order to learn how to do things. That noticeboard here, in the fediverse, not as external links.
2. Make migration between instances easier. Most people will start in mastodon dot social, but might well find another more suited to their interests. It might be sobering for those excited by recent growth to explore how many accounts are dormant - abandoned by users who have migrated to new ones elsewhere.
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@OutOnTheMoors I've never migrated an account, I'd be curious to hear what the pitfalls may be.
@OutOnTheMoors Maybe I'm missing something but those things sound like they would be impossible to avoid. Wouldn't you need to create the account before you migrate to it? Also wouldn't the lost followers be due to an instance being blocked, and if so isn't that unavoidable?
@freemo Not always about blocking. Small instances choose which others they federate with - and the current system allows followers to fall through the cracks this way.
@OutOnTheMoors I'm running an instance here myself. The federation process is automatic, if you follow someone that person becomes federated to the whole server. Furthermore people can follow you from servers you aren't federated with.
The only way a person cant follow someone from another instance is if the person or instance is explicitly banned.
Unless you are talking about someone running an instance with some modified code I'm unaware of?
@freemo It's the migration issue, not pure following.
@OutOnTheMoors If it is an issue unique to migrating have you opened a github issue?
@freemo @probgoblin@mastodon.wafflec.one @OutOnTheMoors@mastodon.wafflec.one
Yeah, it's not exactly optimal at this point.
I'd like to see the next big round of work to focus on portability, not just on the account level but on the backend as well. I'd like to have options to easily migrate my server to Pleroma or Rustodon if I need to.
@freemo At the moment you need to create a new account on the new instance in order to migrate. Several of the popular apps don't support it properly. And there's the fediverse structural issues that your destination instance might not properly recognise others - so you lose followers.
There are ways to work around all these things - I'm trying to give the perspective of a newbie who doesn't understand much about tech.