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https://blog.erlend.sh/fragmentations-in-the-fediverse
Drawing preemptive lines in the sand is not conducive to a healthy #fediverse. In fact, it could very well be its downfall. Large scale separation is antithetical to the social fabric of the world wide web.
Can we take a breather here?
Hostile VC takeovers are very far down the list of problems facing our nascent community of fedizens. Onboarding and retention on the other hand is easily in the top 3.
We need:
Account migrations
Account aliases
Account sovereignty
@erlend so well said all around!
@erlend I agree both with you and @feditips, through a synthesis of sorts:
Are we talking about symptoms or causes/diseases?
@feditips is highlighting symptoms, which if left untreated can evolve into new and worse symptoms.
You’re more focused on causes/diseases (ie, the UX story around instances is sub-optimal), and making the argument that targeting the symptoms too dramatically will simply cause unwanted side effects.
I think both approaches have a place.
@erlend @feditips The value of the approach of @feditips (compared, say, to happily mastodon focused advocacy such as from @davidslifka ), IMO, is that fundamental it recognises #Mastodon is an organisation with its own motives, assets and power, which ultimately deserves, *to some extent*, an antagonistic position, or at least preemptively canvassing as much.
Mastodon may raise all boats and still be a problematic fediverse actor.
It'd isolate 99.9% of all #Mastodon newbies from the rest of the #Fediverse. And it'd support them in their belief that mastodon.social is the Fediverse because that's all they can see. Not only can't they see any other projects anymore, but they can't even see any other Mastodon instances anymore.
The "funnel" effect described by Eugen would fail for two reasons. One, you couldn't move out of mastodon.social anymore without starting over with a whole new set of followers. Two, you wouldn't even know there's something else out there that you could move to, unless someone with both an account on mastodon.social and in the rest of the Fediverse tells you.
Basically, just like it'd take telling Twitter users about Mastodon in tweets to get them to mastodon.social, it'd take telling mastodon.social users about the rest of the Fediverse in toots to get them into the rest of the Fediverse.
Defederating mastodon.social would turn it into a centralised silo. Exactly what it doesn't want to be. But unfortunately, exactly what most invitiations to Mastodon imply it is in order not to scare away those who aren't used to that degree of freedom and being able to choose.
The best solution would be for the official Mastodon app (which, again, 99.9% of all newcomers use because they're neither used to apps having different names than the project nor using a Web browser for social networking) to de-list mastodon.social. And for mastodon.social itself to close registrations again and have everyone trying to register an account choose another instance.
Yes, that'd make on-boarding harder. Yes, that'd scare thousands upon thousands of Twitter refugees away. But maybe it is actually better than mollycoddling newbies and doing everything to back the claim that Mastodon (and the whole Fediverse, for that matter) is Twitter without Musk.
By the way: Mike Macgirvin said that the first steps on the way to introducing #NomadicIdentity to #ActivityPub are being taken.
I wouldn't count on going nomadic between a Mastodon instance and a #Lemmy or #PeerTube instance, or even a #CalcKey instance, will be as fully-featured as going nomadic between two #Hubzilla hubs has been for over a decade, though. But going fully nomadic within one project and maybe partially between multiple projects would be a huge step forward.