TL;DR: The current Mastodon-signup is only removing the confusion of users on first glance, because it either hides the server-choice altogether, or leaves them with a choice that is impossible to make at this point of their Mastodon-journey. Instead, it should introduce them to decentrality on a lower scale, with a handful of handpicked servers to choose from, such that the decision makes sense to them and shows them the merits and fun of the concept instead of scaring them away. Ideal would be to give them a sense of agency. Then, chances are higher that they consider migrating again in the future and eventually internalize it as a permanent option of the digital world.
I’ve been saying this from the go: users don’t need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.
What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn’t add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn’t a feature.
Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes “do you want to see Threads or nah?”, which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.
Not only decentralization is not a feature – it’s a burden. “Normal” users (read: non nerds like 99% of us here) couldn’t care less about which server they should sign up to.
Tbh then just tell em to sign up for mastodon.social, or a specific instance you know they’d like since you know them fairly well, problem solved. They can migrate later if they want anyway, fuck it, they’ll be fine. It’s a masto acct not a limb amputation, like hair so to speak “it’ll grow back.”
Mastodon has account migration? Are we going to get that?
Iirc I heard that is part of this update along with blocking instances but I haven’t yet figured out how to do either, and my instance just logged me out with the update so I finally made the move to eternity and am learning that UI now too instead of jerboa, so it may be a minute before I do figure it out lol.
If you migrate your own account to a new server, do other people follows of you automatically migrate too? Or do all your followers need to then update to follow you at the new location?
I just did this the other week, all of your followers (who are on servers that are still online of course) will follow your new account and unfollow the old account.
It was a bit funny, because I had already signed into the mobile I used and was flooded with notifications as each account followed me (some might be slightly delayed, but all in all it didn’t take more than an hour for the ~50 followers I had).
You will however want to export the list of people you follow from the old account though, because that isn’t automatic. Once you plug the export file into the new account though it’ll do the rest for you.
That sounds very slick. I never really used twitter so had no reason to use mastodon instead, but I am glad it exists!
That kind of attitude leads to being scammed with popups and robbed of all your savings.
Go back to your VCR, Granma.
Though if decentralization were to be hidden, it’d be a good idea to cycle through lots of well established general instances for user signups under the hood. The vast majority of people are just going to choose the default options, and if it’s all going to funnel into mastodon.social, that’s a lot of centralization of users. Ideally no single server lords over all the others in terms of user count, because that gives them lots of power other instances may feel compelled to abide by. Having power spread out across many different people helps keep things in check, at the very least making large or drastic decisions more of a round table affair.