• @deus
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    2111 days ago

    As far as I’m aware, the big “problem” with Mastodon (and the Fediverse as a whole) is that you have to choose an instance to join. It’s an aditional step that mainstream social media does not have and it’s already enough to push regular people away. It’s kinda like trying to convince a Windows user to jump ship to Linux, by the time you begin explaining what a distro is you’ve already lost them.

    • @[email protected]
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      611 days ago

      Like I said in my comment tho. When I downloaded the app it automatically chose for me. I just made an account there and boom.

      • xigoi
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        10 days ago

        So you didn’t get the choice at all? I guess people who sign up this way are going to be really confused why they can’t follow some accounts their friends can.

        • Jupiter Rowland
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          19 days ago

          You can choose. But you don’t have to.

          The official Mastodon app has a box where you can pick one out of several hard-coded instances. It defaults to mastodon.social. You can pick a different instance if you want to. But you can also ignore it, scroll past it and let yourself be conveniently railroaded to mastodon.social without even knowing what an instance is.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 days ago

          Better than no one having the ability to follow that person because a centrally controlled social media banned them.

          • xigoi
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            19 days ago

            But worse than anyone being able to follow that person because they’re using a platform where moderation is separate from identity, as in AtProto.

            • @[email protected]
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              19 days ago

              You are misrepresenting it. You would still run into this issue. Moderation being separate doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You will still not be able to follow someone your friends follow because your moderation service banned then.

              • xigoi
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                19 days ago

                You can choose a different moderation service. That’s the point.

                  • xigoi
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                    7 days ago

                    That choice is tied to your identity and can’t be easily changed later, which is what I’m complaining about.

        • Jupiter Rowland
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          29 days ago

          If you’ve never in your live chosen anything that has to do with IT, if all you know is centralised, monolithic silos, then you can’t be expected to first choose one out of literal dozens of microblogging projects in the Fediverse and then one out of dozens, hundreds or thousands of instances.

          The Fediverse would be a whole lot smaller if not all newbies who didn’t come from Reddit were railroaded hard to mastodon.social. Oh, and Lemmy would be a whole lot smaller without Redditors having been railroaded first to lemmy.ml and now to lemmy.world.

        • @[email protected]
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          19 days ago

          I feel with mastodon it’s different because instances don’t host communities to subscribe to. Just people to follow