Saw an article this morning noting that movement of users from #Twitter to alternatives is dropping off now. When it came to a discussion of #Mastodon, it noted specifically the issue of having to research and choose an instance to get started, noting that most people wanting to leave Twitter want to do so quickly with as few additional decisions required as possible. Of course, there are many people here who clearly don't *want* folks from Twitter easily "contaminating" their ecosystem here. And I will continue to speak out against this view.
@lauren and to finalise my three part reply!
Choosing an instance on Mastodon, placed me immediately in a community of interest. I had immediate engagement that was at least somewhat relevant, unlike in twitter where I was just having stuff shoved at me by algorithm.
I think there's actually an advantage in requiring people to choose an instance, or at least, putting a roadblock, albeit an easily bypassable one, that encourages people to choose an instance of interest before joining
/3
@techlife I've heard this so many times. And I still view it as an essentially narrow and selfish view. Period.
@lauren I'm not clear which specific point I made that you are replying to? I'd like to know what's selfish about anything I said, if you are willing to elucidate.
Btw by putting a roadblock, I wasn't suggesting forcing people to have to choose an instance (though I'm curious how it is decided what instance they join if they don't have a choice).
I'm talking about having as part of the sign up, a screen that explains the advantage of choosing a relevant instance, that user can "skip"
@techlife The instance choosing part is the biggest roadblock. I haven't had time to write up a document on this, so I can only refer you for now to my many posts on this topic here, which I wish I had a good way to index ...
There is the annoying conflation of (at least) two things that an instance is: identity provider and community. If we could decouple those at least somewhat, one could imagine a setup where one could be a member of many instances. In that world instance choice is much easier ("identity provider" is not important ~at all, "community" is postponeable).
We still need to authenticate messages from the user. We can either have the handle be associated with a public key (and hand the user the private key), or with some sort of key trust system. In either case we need a mechanism that creates a trusted association of the handle with the key/... (imagine two users creating the same handle: how do we make it so that they don't impersonate one another?).
So, we need either handles that aren't chosen freely or global consensus.
Two obvious approaches, both with warts, are:
- handle _is_ the public key, private key is in user's hand (warts: loss of private key and its leak are both unfixable, handles are meaningless gobbledygook),
- hang handle->public key assignment off a global CA system: TLS CAs (warts: we require intermediaries who own domains and who are trusted to act as the user, we can't switch between intermediaries without lasting cooperation of the previous one).
Do you see other approaches/classes of approaches?
