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?
Edit: Yes. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3976
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.
Here’s another way: stop referring to everything “Twitter-like” as Mastodon. Stop referring to everything “Reddit-like” as Lemmy. Those are both client platforms through which one can access ActivityPub content.
Conflating the platform with the provider with the protocol with the content is what’s confusing people.
Are you saying to start calling all of it ActivityPub? In which case, I would think that’d be extra confusing since lemmy and mastodon don’t cross-interface very well and you really need one client for each type.
… without mentioning Twitter.
That seems like a pretty arbitrary restriction. At this point, a basic knowledge of “what Twitter is like” is a pretty general-knowledge thing.
I like this, though I will say I acutally prefer the playful choice idea. Not Hogwarts for me particular, but in general.
- 2 is good.
Decentralization doesn’t matter until it does. Recruiting people to your specific Mastodon instance is ideal and simple. All they need out of the decentralization concept is to know they can’t be screwed if Elon takes over their instance.
I’m curious about the state of account migrations right now. Ideally it should be super easy and it should strengthen the Fediverse if people can hope platforms with ease when an admin isn’t behaving as they should.
One technical challenge might be deletion
- Admins need to be able to delete or quarantine harmful / illegal content
- You can’t move instances if an admin suddenly comes along and deletes everything
Could on-device backups be a thing? The collective userbase takes up a lot of storage, but each individual person probably doesn’t upload more than their phone can store. It might also incentivize them to not spam large files
I think account migration will have to come in two waves. It would be far easier to migrate accounts that are federated. That should be as simple as name swapping comments and posts and assigning them to the opposite servers while handing over user data.
The hard part is with servers who do not federate. Two solutions exist. One would have a data hop. It’s very likely that defederated servers would contain some link somewhere between federated servers. So the original server would pass data through one or two other servers to get to your new destination server that otherwise wouldn’t receive that data.
The other solution involves allowing a user to download their content with a key from the server and then present that to the new server. That data may need to be encrypted or have verification somehow to prevent tampering before reuploading it.
Any of these solutions will probably require manually approving and sorting through of data. The good news is that you can make requirements to say that users should have so many upvotes or whatever to receive a transfer to your platform. So their backup of data can sit still until you’re deemed worthy of transfer.
I’d say that data backups on your phone should definitely be an option regardless.
Account migration and backup are features of lemmy v0.19
