We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-s…)
#decentralisation #federation #fediverse #SmallWeb
What is the Small Web?
Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about: The Small Web.Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.
Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.
I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.
#decentralisation #centralisation #fediverse #SmallWeb
user not found
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Ricardo
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Optimising #Mastodon = designing flows that encourage people to leave mastodon.social for other instances, not accepting any more new members on mastodon.social, and making design changes that limit how much a single instance can scale.
A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, is not a design success in decentralisation, it’s a design failure. (It’s a design success in #BigTech.)
CC @Gargron
#decentralisation #centralisation #federation
Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •PS. This isn’t some new revelation; I’ve been advocating for this from the start :)
mastodon.social/@aral/2160843
#mastodon #federation #decentralisation #centralisation #design #singleTenant #SmallWeb
Hippo 🍉
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •this makes sense, and is incidentally something I was thinking about this morning too.
scholar.social/@badri/10927359…
Does it say something that I took "we should get people off mastodon.social" as an established fact rather than a new revelation? 😅
Badri (@badri@scholar.social)
Scholar SocialValhalla_Dev
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Jigme Datse
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Gabriel ☕️
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Dragon 🐉
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I wonder resource wise what’s more efficient, less big servers or lots of little ones.
That said there are plenty of other things that waste energy about
sudo βραχυκύκλωμα
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@aral@mastodon.ar.a Finally someone said it.
@Gargron
sudo βραχυκύκλωμα
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to sudo βραχυκύκλωμα • • •@specktator_ Been saying it for a while ;)
mastodon.ar.al/@aral/100542567…
ar.al🌻 (@aral@mastodon.ar.al)
Aral’s Mastodoncasey is remote
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@Gargron I disagree somewhat; yes, scaling well is an L for decentralization, but it is a W for the freedom of hosters.
What if you want to use #Mastodon to host your own centralized platform? #TruthSocial is a good example of this; #Trump aside, it's awesome that you can use #Mastodon to both be part of a huge network, make your own network, or make a standalone social site.
Wolfgang
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Die Krähenpost
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Die Krähenpost • • •@kraehenpost Maybe it’s naïve, maybe it’s ~ a decade of thinking about the problem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(It comes down to your definition of “working.” If we manage to recreate twitter.com on mastodon.social, I wouldn’t define that as “working” but as “failed.”)
Sam Deane
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •David Wynn
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Dr. Quadragon ❌
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I wouldn't be so categorical.
> A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people
means that running an instance for couple thousands or hundreds people is becoming way cheaper, and as a result, more accessible.
This is the exact problem that, for instance, Matrix has. It's voracious, and a nightmare to work with, so just anyone from the street can't afford to host it. Whereas XMPP servers like ejabberd or Prosody can serve tens of thousands of users from a matchbox computer like rPi. So I can be confident that they will handle my needs easy-peasy.
And Mastodon as well is such a beast, that code optimization is way overdue. I think we should welcome it when the software is trying to get better, not bash its creator for it.
@Gargron
j
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to j • • •@jay @Gargron Big Tech is designed to scale vertically because their success criteria is continuous (ideally exponential) growth*. It’s that ideology/success criteria that drives their client/multi-tenant server design. When you adopt that design, you inherently adopt the success criteria that created it. And if that ideology/success criteria are not aligned with your own, you have a problem on your hands.
* with finite resources (an interesting one to think about… 🤔)
Nemo_bis 🌈
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •fedidb.org/network/instance?do…
FediDB - Developer Tools for ActivityPub
fedidb.orgn8chz 🩎
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •william.maggos
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@Gargron
Is there any server software optimized for single user instances?
Eric Prenen
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •KitKat
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@Gargron
It implies also making interoperability between servers seemless.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3…
You can feel the problems even as a tech enthusiast... and get used to it so you don't view it as a big problem.
But normal people who are not tech enthusiasts are less likely to go through that effort and have a more difficult process
Taking a Look at Mastodon | Hacker News
news.ycombinator.comDavid
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Ralf Rottmann
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •AlexanderLFrancis
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •tursiops
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Nika2022 🐶🎶🌐☕️
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Willis Jackson III
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Mattias Schlenker
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Maarten den Braber
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Mark
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Totally agree. Although if Mastodon gains some more traction there will be people leaving mastodon.social because they find it does not fit their needs.
I for one am on my own server because mastodon.social often feels to left for me.
But decentralisation is key. For the good of the Fediverse and people in general.
We are not built for one monolithic community where everyone is the same.
We are all equal, not the same.
Jimi Viita-aho
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Jennifer Harrison
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Jennifer Harrison • • •@GeneticJen Hey, every step is a step and that sounds like a very positive one :)
I think what I was saying was about “decentring yourself” (as in making things that don’t rely on you being at the centre to be successful) but decentralising yourself sounds good too :)
PS. Hugo (@mastohost hosts mine and he’s great, in case you don’t want yet another server to admin).
Jennifer Harrison
in reply to Jennifer Harrison • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Jennifer Harrison • • •@GeneticJen I’d love nothing more than to be able to skip to that step. And we’re not a million miles away… but I’m still working on infrastructure :)
(I also wish it was just about writing lines of code. It’s not. It’s about attempting to make it sustainable both in the current environment and in the one we want to move towards, about trying to use bits and pieces of what exists to build a bridge towards where we want to be… and about sharing every brick so others can build other bridges.)
Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •ottonafo 🇺🇦
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •what keeps me from doing so is that i don't wanna lose my posts in this process (which'd be the case afaik) as i frequently dig up older threads for various reasons.
Aral Balkan
in reply to ottonafo 🇺🇦 • • •@ottona Mastodon has a very nifty migration feature (as well as data backup and restore). You shouldn’t have to lose anything, including your social graph :)
See docs.joinmastodon.org/user/mov…
Moving or leaving accounts
docs.joinmastodon.orgAral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Peter :antifa: 💉💉💉 (@pludikovsky@chaos.social)
chaos.socialJuan Luis
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Nick
in reply to Juan Luis • • •@astrojuanlu @ottona Yeah, I went through the migration process yesterday and it was surprisingly painful.
Lost all my Toots from the old instance, and it would not let me transfer my followers because there was some backlog processing taking place at the time.
Really a terrible experience that should have more work done to improve it.
Aral Balkan
in reply to Nick • • •@CorruptComputer @astrojuanlu @ottona Ah, sorry to hear that; not what I would have expected.
So the process is currently to manually export your data, run the migration feature, and manually import your data back?
(If so, yes, this is very confusing and I would likely have lost five years’ worth of posts had I not seen this and tried it myself too. I’d expect a migration feature to migrate all my data. The flow should guarantee this.)
CC @Gargron
Nick
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@astrojuanlu @ottona @Gargron You can manually import your Following list, Blocking list, Muting list, Domain blocking list, and Bookmarks.
Your Followers rely on the old server being able to handle the request, which I had issues with.
Your Toots are not portable at all, and there is a feature request from 6 years ago asking for this over on the GitHub but no work has been done on it as far as I can tell. github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i…
Import toots from CSV · Issue #981 · mastodon/mastodon
GitHubAndreas K
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Darshak Parikh
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Exactly. Fediverse is meant to scale horizontally.
This small instance I’m on (<800 users) was unaffected by performance issues during the Twitter exodus, which is the whole point of federation.
Rokosun
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •If you're interested in a more decentralized system then there are p2p networks like scuttlebutt.nz/, you can try it out by using the @manyver_se client. I guess its good to have these options
What I like most about p2p networks is that everyone is a node in the network by default, you don't need to know how to run your own server to have that freedom.
Scuttlebutt
scuttlebutt.nzAral Balkan
in reply to Rokosun • • •Lohan Gunaweera
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Al
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Al • • •Ethan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •.@aral I agree but it's undeniable that the common folk doesn't want and shouldn't need to run their own instance.
A few design choices that might move people towards a more federated Mastodon landscape:
- Have a page that shows you with which instances you interact the most
- Allow moderators to limit or soft-limit new registrations
- Have generalist instances suggest users to move to other communities after a while
Elliot
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Kye Fox
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Mauve 👁💜
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •gergo
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •alec timmerman 🇪🇺
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •killdang
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Stephan (moved house)
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Max
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •kcarruthers
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Christian
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I wouldn't see it to bleak though. When I arrived here, I welcomed the presence of a bigger server to get started. Soon after I looked for peers (for me in science), got signposts, and ended up at the present server, which is much smaller.
I am sure that many others will have the same journey.
I know you advocate the "small web", and well, such journeys may make people more comfortable with the idea in the medium and long run!
psyBunny 🐰
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to psyBunny 🐰 • • •Martin Mazur 🟡
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I’m guessing the key difference is that you can always move instance.
This way it can fit everyone - both the specialist and the generalist.
Having large generic instances is also a good way to get started - for example I’m almost sure I’m on the wrong instance; yet I don’t really know which one would be the ”right” yet.
Raine
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Adamas Nemesis
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •ehballah 🇺🇦
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Tremarctos Ornatus
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Sexybiggetje🐖
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •larryfeltonj
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Oblomov
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •larryfeltonj
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Alex Standiford
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Guy Montag
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •The Small Web as described in the article sounds good, but I'm having trouble picturing how to convince people join in.
I don't think anyone today is under the illusion that Google, Facebook and others are altruistic organizations. But the majority of their users accept the intrusions of privacy and lack of control in exchange for simplicity. It takes only a few seconds and no debugging to sign up for an account. 1/2
Guy Montag
in reply to Guy Montag • • •Grandma is fine with Facebook and Skype icons on her desktop. How will you convince her to manage a database?
There are already constant stories about how hackers can break into home WiFi networks, yet I know very few people willing to configure their own WAPs. That sounds much less daunting to me than saying someone has to build their own Small Web. 2/2
Aral Balkan
in reply to Guy Montag • • •@Montag Well, first off, Grandma could be a computer programmer for all we know, so let’s say someone who is not versed in the technical aspects of computing (like a brain surgeon, for example). With that out of the way: if they have to configure a database, you’ve already lost.
If they can sign up for it as easily as signing up for Facebook and use it without having to maintain it, you have a chance at winning.
We’re trying to build the latter :)
Aral Balkan
Unknown parent • • •@shine Exactly :)
Mastodon is what Mastodon is at this point and I don’t see it embracing #degrowth (although I’ll be the first to sing it praises if it does).
I’d love to see more single-tenant ActivityPub implementations (and hopefully they’ll support the migration protocols implemented Mastodon).
max frühschütz – нет войне
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •the thing is, a lot of people want twitter and in the public consciousness mastodon kind of took place at being the ethical alternative (it helps that is not controlled by musk)
but essentially what (i feel) most people want is:
- a free (as in beer) twitter-like thing (as in: a digital public town square)
- a non-algorithmic timeline (chronological for the win)
- incentives to not turn every discussion into flame wars
the concept of instances is one abstraction step too much for most.
Pavneet Singh Saund🤘🏽
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I have to say - I have been very intrigued around starting a server of my own, but I don't really know what I'm getting in to. I'm not used to managing my own personal infra, servers etc. I've done so before when I was a lot younger - but have landed very much in the "these aren't the problems I want to spend time on"-camp.
Perhaps it's a mindset shift? Maybe I'll value that more and take the steps for myself, because I see the importance of small over big?
Aral Balkan
in reply to Pavneet Singh Saund🤘🏽 • • •@pavsaund The thing is, you shouldn’t have to know what you’re getting into in order to do it. The fact that you need all that technical knowledge to get started is a failing on our part as designers/developers. We’re working on fixing that but in order to do so we must design technology differently (so it can be owned and controlled by people themselves not by others for them).
In the interim, there are folks like @mastohost that make it easier to host the current alternatives :)
Simeon Nedkov
in reply to Pavneet Singh Saund🤘🏽 • • •@pavsaund I’ve gradually shifted into that camp as well. Spent years running my own Nextcloud server and got tired of all the tiny things that kept popping up. At the end I bought managed Nextcloud to be rid of them and one day realized: that’s what Dropbox has been all along.
I’m not saying Nextcloud should not exist because there’s Dropbox. My point is that running/owning alternatives to Big Tech should be as hassle free as using Big Tech itself.
Simeon Nedkov
in reply to Simeon Nedkov • • •@pavsaund I think we should promote “hassle free Mastodon” experiences instead of “run your own server”. The latter screams “work I don’t want to do” at me.
The underlying implementation can stay the same. It’s a matter of packaging the thing, meaning: you tell customers that they pay for and create a Mastodon account but under water you spin up a new instance for them.
In this scenario you are creating personal servers for everybody without them knowing (because they don’t care).
Aral Balkan
in reply to Simeon Nedkov • • •@simeon @pavsaund You’ll get no argument on that from me ;) ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-s…
(Apart from perhaps that we should also be looking at designs that aim to make doing what you describe as easy as possible. It’s much easier to set up a system that’s explicitly designed to serve one person than one that is designed to serve 1-100,000 people. The complexity involved is orders of magnitude less in the former.)
#singleTenant #SmallWeb #decentralisation #federation
What is the Small Web?
Aral BalkanSimeon Nedkov
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@pavsaund Agree and I love the/your Small Web concept.
Would a Mastodon-instance-per-person qualify as Small Web or are there other things to consider (as well)?
Aral Balkan
in reply to Simeon Nedkov • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •biffbiffbiff 🛡️
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan reshared this.
Aral Balkan
in reply to biffbiffbiff 🛡️ • • •Aral Balkan
Unknown parent • • •@max And yet, oddly, we all want to live in our own houses… and a collection of houses creates a village… 🤔
;)
stop genocide in gaza
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •We should have a few BIG landing-pad servers for new people, always.
"Find a nice server" is an impossible first step.
"Make an account on any of these big servers, it doesn't matter which. Later when you notice all the most interesting people hang at x.y, move there. No biggie." is what the advice to new users should be, IMO.
#federation #fediverse #decentralization
Aral Balkan
in reply to stop genocide in gaza • • •stop genocide in gaza
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I'm not sure I understand.
If someone needs email it doesn't matter which provider they get, as long as they pass certain minimum criteria.
If someone needs Mastodon, unless they go on a big server it DOES matter where they go.
kcarruthers
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Ewan Donnachie
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •But we do need to make it easier for people to get started. It's confusing to have to choose an instance before you can gain experience.
Perhaps a suitable general server could be "suggested" for people so that the don't all sign up to the "canonical" instance? They can always switch later, in their own time, when they're in a position to make an informed decision.
Aral Balkan
Unknown parent • • •@zpneal Nope; I’ve been doing it since 2017 :)
Initially set it up myself but I don’t need another server to maintain so very happy to let @mastohost do it for me :)
Kris Mitka
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Kris Mitka (@mitka@hachyderm.io)
Hachyderm.ioDave Briggs
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •івась тарасик
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •and if you take that line of thinking even a bit further to its _real_ conclusion… you arrive at the idea behind peer 2 peer networks— where every #fediverse client is a server.
p.s. i'm not saying this is or should be the goal, just pointing out how lines of thinking don't always end where one thinks they do
Aral Balkan
in reply to івась тарасик • • •n8chz 🩎
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •kaip
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Brett Camper
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Blake Eastman
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •David Andersen
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •If I may politely disagree? Many of the same optimizations that could help mastodon.social have more users also make it so that running a different instance is cheaper.
It's worth differentiating "scaling by being able to use EVEN BIGGER hardware" (not so awesome in this view) vs "scaling through optimizations" which is a strict win. It's great if you can host a good-sized instance on a $100 machine.
toallpointswest
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •michael miller jr
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •This does make sense to me. As I learn more about the #fediverse I'm becoming more interested in the smaller instances. I, for one, welcome this mindset shift.
The idea of setting up my own instance is appealing... but I don't think I fully understand the required investment yet.
BestWeather
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •jlindgren
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I agree, but the hard part is the vast majority of people aren't techy enough for this.
As such...I do wonder if there is a hole in the ecosystem for an easy "create your account on one of these pre-configured domains" site, kind of like freedns.afraid.org does it.
That way users would maybe be spread out among those pre-configured instances rather than the singular monolithic one.
(scrot attached for reference)
Matthijs De Smedt
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I think we need Decentralized Identity to finally happen more than anything. There's no reason why, in this age, the Fediverse still works like E-mail. With all our data and identity stored on a single server identified with a traditional user@domain URL.
Once you can use your private key to interact with your identity on any server at any time, that's when #decentralization can really kick off. Mastodon.social down? No problem! Just seamlessly continue from another server...
OpenDNA⚙️
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Jason Green
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Jeena
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aaron Parecki
aaronparecki.comKuJoe 💞
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •This thread really opened my eyes and as an instance owner I'm going to put some thought into how to tackle this problem.
I appreciate you taking the time to point this out to better improve the Fediverse.
Aral Balkan
in reply to KuJoe 💞 • • •doomy 🦀
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to doomy 🦀 • • •@doomy Because they’re diametrically opposed :)
The more complexity you add to handle vertical scale the harder you make it for individuals to self host.
All that said, Mastodon is what it is. Likely too late to change course now. But hopefully we’ll see more interest in single- tenant fediverse clients going forward.
Karl Steel
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Karl Steel • • •Wiredfire
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •infinite love ⴳ
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Alison Hearn
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Dylan McCall
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •One thing that would help me move off mastodon.online is a way to migrate accounts that works in an adversarial environment. So, “I don’t have any access to my old account, but I do have this certificate.”
I like the idea of moving my account around freely between small instances, but I feel like I need to be picky because I don’t have the energy to deal with them shutting down or having weird admins.
CleverG@mes🇺🇦🇪🇺⚛️
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Thousands of servers just confuse people and make the network less efficient
Desikner
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@max We want to drink a beer in a crowded pub, never in an empty pub. We live in cities or villages and not alone in the countryside. People are social, we want to belong to a group. That's why people flock to mastodon.social.
It doesn't help that most of the media has been reporting and promoting Mastodon as an open-source Twitter alternative without mentioning the fediverse or it's decentralised nature.
Dizzy
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •PseudoRandom#
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I would modify that principle slightly.
Yes you want fewer people/server and many servers. BUT, you also want those servers to be able to serve as backups to a few other small servers, too. A decentralized torrent like redundancy to minimize impact of single node failure. THAT's old school small web. :)
João Almeida
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •And aren't the more generic servers always going to be more crowded than the niche ones?
Nick
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I don't think Mastodon should ignore the needs of large instances. If a community is built up, the platform should support that.
I agree that it shouldn't cater only to large instances, but saying that Mastodon shouldn't optimize for that use case also isn't right either imo.
The platform should support however you want to use it. Self-hosted private instances, small communities, and large communities should all work well.
Delajor🍞
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •if you bring this idea to its logical conclusion you get myspace with each user getting a server and the feed becomes your wall...
Where does the slider land?
Netux
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Could sync browsers, leave notes, run a little blog.
As long as you turned it on, the browser connected to their server and it functioned like dns to direct you directly to the endpoint.
Paul Sutton
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Kye Fox
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Swamptin
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Michael Brooks :verified:
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Adamas Nemesis
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Grant 🇺🇦ArmUkraine🇺🇦
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Manorial Meerkat✝️🔰🏙️
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Rally Vincent 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Karen E. Lund 💙💛
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I've already seen a couple of mentions of new servers (instances), plus one person who decided to create a personal server.
Like... yeah, I've been on Mastodon for four years and it never occurred to me that I'd want my own server. I feel like an underachiever.
Denny Vrandečić
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Jason Tucker
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Joeri Vlekken
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Daniel Quinn
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Refurio Anachro
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •The biggest issue I had setting up a server was to provide a way to send emails. The complexity of the software itself, while no laughing matter, is a problem which can be solved nicely with docker.
@aral
arealibrarian
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Shoq
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •rosano
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Lucien Knechtli
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •when I decided to switch to mastodon from birdsite, this was my experience:
* Google mastodon
* look at the very limited list of "endorsed instances"
* find almost nothing applicable other than the general ones, with furry and foreign making a large appearance
* join the largest general instance I could find, because who has time to read 3 blog posts to understand why it doesn't matter?
1st step: fix that list or link to a better one
Chris Lombardi
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Mattias Schlenker
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •