a “join custom server” button could be added!

100%!

Sure, but phpBB boards are separate entities, not parts of a whole… So that’s not really a 1 to 1 comparison, IMO.

That being said, you’re right. If people started sharing instances directly instead of just saying “Mastodon,” this issue would be attenuated, at the very least.

The issue is that people want the social part of social media. If you share mastodon.social, people will think “Mastodon,” but if you share indieweb.social people will be confused, and possible disinterested because they don’t necessarily expect to be connected to the other “Mastodons.” At the end of the day, you’ll always have to say it’s a “Mastodon Server,” and as soon as that gets brought up, I’m afraid it might push people away before they even get a foot in.

Then again, that’s kind of how Discord gets shared around, so maybe that’s OK, IDK.

Lemmy is better for on-boarding on this front as they have the Local and All feeds from the start. Just having that front and centre (defaulting to Local, as you don’t want to overwhelm them) would be a big help.

Yup, Lemmy does it really well.

So how about 2 big points: auto-selector (based on location) and answer a couple of questions.

I think that’s totally fine. The big point is that the user shouldn’t choose a server. Answer a few questions that can lead to a server? OK. But as soon as you make someone choose you might be reintroducing that confusion that seems to not be very popular with normies.

While I’d be fine with an auto-selector (as I help Admin feddit.uk), it would miss out on the variety of instances out there - books, games (video, tabletop, etc), franchises, etc that some people might be looking for.

Here, I’ll point to this thread by Ted Curran: https://indieweb.social/@tedcurran/113946323075198755

Also, this reply thread https://lemm.ee/comment/18473212

Ted talks about how it might be best to simply send people to one instance (a sort of starter instance) and then encourage them to move to a different, more specific one. Other users complain that account migration is insufficient.

Maybe, after improving account migration, we should send users to a few semi-random starter instances that have agreed to a certain set of rules and adhere to a set of quality standards, but then encourage them to leave by migrating their account to an instance that better matches their interests.

From what I’ve gathered with the replies I’ve been getting, this might actually be the best solution, for now. Though, of course, it does include a significant improvement over the tech side, rather than relatively simple UI changes…

My understanding is, in the early days, you could send an SMS to Twitter to post, and that is the origin of character limits.

OH! Had no idea!

Well, maybe they’ll remove it if the community pushes for it.

Longevity.

100% percent! This needs to be taken into account.

Migration.

I definitely think account migration should be improved, but I wonder how feasible that is, in a technical sense… I don’t know how that sort of data is structured at all.

Federation/Defederation

That’s a good point. Once again, I really don’t know of a solution to this. I’m not too familiar with how federation works, in a technical sense. Servers should definitely make their blocked servers and whatnot public by default, though.

Privacy

Of course, it’s impossible to make sure that every single server is safe. My point was that, if everyone is in the same server, then the risk of something going bad for any number of people increases, versus if everyone is in a bunch of different servers. I guess it’s a balance between the trustworthiness of many people with control over a few and the trustworthiness of a few people with control over many. Maybe it’s not so relevant. Most people don’t care about privacy anyway, I was just trying to make a point about why decentralization should be valued in a practical sense.

Yeah, there’s a lot of things that still need to be improved!

Quite frankly, I never understood the point of character limits to begin with. I mean, sure, don’t let people post literal novels on your short-form social media platform, but it being a short-form social media platform already conditions people not to post novels…

Yeah. I see astro_ray in the thread has already replied to that point… It’s ridiculous!

Oh… I feel like I vaguely remember something like that, actually…

Thank you for sharing, and thank you for speaking about promoting and growing the Fediverse!

I don’t dislike your idea, but I wonder how users would react to being encouraged to create a new account.

That wink gives a certain malicious aura to the message…

That’s… Certainly a way to do it!

There’s actually an Android Mastodon client called Tusky, which I think sounds really nice.

I really know nothing about this stuff >///< thank you for your input!

This isn’t good, though. The whole point of the Fediverse is to be a decentralized network. If we push everyone to a single server, we’re centralizing the network!

This comes with added expenses for the maintainers, for one, and increases privacy and data-protection concerns as well.

Also, Mastodon actually already funnels people towards .social, though they don’t push it too hard. Check out joinmastodon.org and see for yourself.

IMO, the solution needs to be something like a server auto-selector, where the location of the user is taken into account, weighted by the number of active users on the server, and using some sort of vetting system to try to avoid sending people to unmaintained servers (like only selecting servers with a certain degree of uptime and uptime stability).

Not the case, necessarily.

In Portugal, for example, it’s legal to download pirated content. It’s not a matter of not pursuing it because it’s hard or being difficult to catch or distributors are an easier target, it’s just that, legally, you’re not doing anything wrong.