As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there’d be a flood.
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
Yeah, things requiring choosing a instance like, say, email, are doomed to fail
I’m guessing you meant this sarcastically, but you may have been right for the wrong reasons. Look at this graph, by the metric of the way the fediverse works that is a failure. Apple and Google are massively dominant because people don’t want to think about it and most just go with their phone os maker who makes them create one when setting it up, and there is no fediverse server equivalent to that.
This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
So what, should we have a website where you push a button and it sends you to a random instance to sign up?
Just imagine the surprise when a new user is placed in hexbear or one of the porn servers.
Then it was fate and they should just accept it.
Sorting Hat for Lemmy?
joinmastodon.org (the ‘official’ way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So… I guess that’s not a barrier after all.