I love federation but I just don’t see it reaching the masses. People want connectivity and simplicity. I am willing to accept a centralized solution if it’s a non profit who takes care of moderators. Centralization isn’t always terrible, look at Wikipedia.
I have a feeling this post is some sort of joke, but as a serious comment, I think decentralization would work better if there were some way to automate assigning new users to instances. This part of onboarding is something that people I know (who have looked at Mastodon then turned down the idea of joining it) have cited as an annoyance. And I know I personally spent some time researching different instances in order to pick my instance, personally.
Contrast Revolt, a relatively recent (in contrast to Matrix) Discord alternative, which a few people people I know jumped right on – despite Discord not having any major/recent “sins” other than messing with the usernames. I mentioned that I’m surprised people so readily picked this up, and someone pointed out that there’s just one centralized place to make a Revolt account.
I’d hope that it would be federated. I’m feeling increasingly convinced that federation is the path forward for most forums/social media.
I love federation but I just don’t see it reaching the masses. People want connectivity and simplicity. I am willing to accept a centralized solution if it’s a non profit who takes care of moderators. Centralization isn’t always terrible, look at Wikipedia.
I have a feeling this post is some sort of joke, but as a serious comment, I think decentralization would work better if there were some way to automate assigning new users to instances. This part of onboarding is something that people I know (who have looked at Mastodon then turned down the idea of joining it) have cited as an annoyance. And I know I personally spent some time researching different instances in order to pick my instance, personally.
Contrast Revolt, a relatively recent (in contrast to Matrix) Discord alternative, which a few people people I know jumped right on – despite Discord not having any major/recent “sins” other than messing with the usernames. I mentioned that I’m surprised people so readily picked this up, and someone pointed out that there’s just one centralized place to make a Revolt account.
This is 100% the problem. Makes me wonder if I should write a webpage just for automating signups.