https://spreadmastodon.org/utilities/round-robin
Mastodon wants to make sign-ups easier and direct new registrations automatically to 4 chosen instances in round-robin mode. These instances have to fulfill certain criteria to be eligible, but in any case one them will move out of rotation per year.
I think it is a good concept to actually avoid a single instance dominating everything else and over multiple years the rotation should avoid too strong clustering and makes usability much simpler.
Would this be something you would look for in lemmy as well in the long-term? Or would you trade the benefit of a concious decision at the potential cost of alienating people who just want to get the easiest way, which could happen to be a centralized big tech?
I wouldn’t have a problem with round robin if you could still manually choose an instance, had the ability to move your account, and the servers were vetted and in good standing.
Of course you can sign-up where you want to. This should only act as a front landing page for Mastodon.
That sounds like a great idea. I’m pretty tech savvy and still struggled a bit with finding a Lemmy community that wasn’t overloaded, didn’t have restrictions that weren’t suitable for my intended use, etc. I tried to create accounts on 2 other instances before succeeding.
I’m sure there are diverse views on this issue, but it seems to me Lemmy will be the most fun if there are enough users being active in enough communities to serve most of users’ various interests. We don’t have to have as many users as Reddit, but just enough to make things maximally interesting. And I fear we won’t get there without lower barriers to entry.
This is great in theory but needs federation to work seamlessly. It’s still a bit of a challenge to find amd take part in cross-instance communities
Would that be a good or bad thing for the instance owner? Wouldn’t smaller communities have a harder time growing?
The instance owner needs to apply for it in the first place. Unlikely the average Joe would pick a tiny instance. Since it is federated, growing is not greatly applicable.