Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky

Hey... that just gave me a small idea... what if we made a "flock" or "herd" of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.

When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?

Honestly that’s probably the best sort of solution. A group that has some minimum standards of moderation and maintenance/upgrade management plan and just evenly distribute the load as people arrive.

Then as a second phase make it easy to transfer, that way at the point the user gets comfortable they can easily swap to a better* “home” for those that care, for those that don’t, make the server choice be virtually invisible.
- i like the idea of a server choice virtually invisible feature!
Let me see how you get instance admins to agree on what to defederate.
- Maybe a vote of 75% minimum would be good?
If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn't get overloaded?
- You'd have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname
  
  This is quite unnecessary, it would be simpler if we have a list of the long-running and most stable instances and have the users pick one.
  
  That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.
Basically, a single instance
When you make an account

Where?
- When you go to comment on a blog, where do you sign up?
Man, it feels like you guys haven't spoken to a real human in decades...

Yeah, things requiring choosing a instance like, say, email, are doomed to fail

I’m guessing you meant this sarcastically, but you may have been right for the wrong reasons. Look at this graph, by the metric of the way the fediverse works that is a failure. Apple and Google are massively dominant because people don’t want to think about it and most just go with their phone os maker who makes them create one when setting it up, and there is no fediverse server equivalent to that.
- This looks like it's conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn't provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
  
  ~~Same with Apple mail right? I never used an Apple device and was shocked to see them over Gmail because I thought Apple actually gives email service when I saw the graph~~
  
  Apple does have an email service, but I think "Apple Mail" is the name is the client, not the service.
  
  TIL
  
  Apple does give email service for two decades now
  
  Oh I see. Thanks for the clarification.
- Nevertheless email stays the defacto standard for business communication and has stayed intercompatible with a wide range of clients, servers and plugins. So this graph could be better but is apparently not a big issue as long as companies and unis keep running their own servers, forcing big tech to stay with the standards.
  
  That works when the decentralized protocol is the 800 lb gorilla first. You can’t get there with the fediverse in this internet era, sadly.
  
  Email also doesn’t have a moderation factor that requires emotional work.
  
  The matrix protocol is a good example to prove you wrong. It has been popularized in the past 5-6 years (i.e. this era of the internet) it has well over 100 million users and growing, is being used in hundreds of universities and wont stop growing, is being used by government bodies all over the world and has unified most of the software dev landscape into one protocol. Its hard fucking work and you have to start with exactly those groups which are easier to convince and then you can move on to the average consumer. Thats how email did it and thats how matrix will do it.
- I don’t think I’ve ever received an e-mail from an Apple Mail address.
  
  Same, does it go by another name or something?
  
  I'm pretty sure "apple mail" refers to the Mail app on iPhones and Macs, not the email address. There's probably tons of people using Gmail addresses with the Apple Mail app.
- Wow, I wouldn't have thought that Apple Mail is more popular than Gmail.
  
  Nobody really actively chooses Apple Mail.
  
  It's just that they buy iPhones, and they want a total no-brainer, like, a phone that's fully set up and ready to use without them having to do anything because it, like, totally confuzzles them 'n stuff. So whichever friendly salesperson sells them their phone also sets everything up for them. Including an e-mail account because they need one for their Apple account, but they don't know if they've got one.
  
  If they buy an Android phone, it's the same, only that they get a Gmail account if they don't happen to already have one.
- So you are saying Mastodon won't take off because people need to choose a server but also because having a "default" where majority will ptobably end up is bad - but this is literally the solution to the problem you mentioned
  
  It's the solution on the user experience side, but not the backend/server side. For both infrastructure and idealogical reasons. These two things don't have to be the same.
  
  Disney parks wants park visitors to feel like their exploring, but design in such a way that thepy don't actually stray that far from the preferred paths. Also they have clear sign posting.
  
  There's no reason the fediverse can't design the opposite. Helping users into feeling like there's a set path, and that they're doing the right thing, while subtly encouraging exploration.
  
  It's just the opposite of where all talent and techniques of internet software design are right now, so it's going to take some work.
  
  Edit: Most people don't jump into a hedge to get off the main road, they find a small, unplanned trail or desire path, then learn to navigate the jungle when that path ends.
- Still, this chart looks like it's actually counting phone apps rather than providers. Google doesn't have two separate e-mail services AFAIK.
I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.

It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).

All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.

For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.

IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
- IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
  
  Plus, it keeps the obnoxious "But muh follower count" fame whores and the majority of the "Why can't this be exactly like Twitter, I want a total Twitter clone" dumb-dumbs out. They'd ruin Fediverse culture even more than the second migration wave two years ago which was so massive that those who fled back then only encountered each other on Mastodon and hardly anyone who had been in the Fediverse before then.
At least in the early days of email before gmail, hotmail, or yahoo, you would get assigned an email from your work, university, or ISP.
- Exactly why most Germans only had a @t-online.de address back in the day. The only exceptions were those who needed an e-mail account before they had their own home and their own landline connection.
Not really. I mean, sure it’s the same concept, but email has been getting semi-centralized between the big players now, with gmail and maybe icloud getting the largest chunk of users. That would be similar to letting users choose between .world or .ml to sign up with, which is against the fediverse principle to spread the load as wide as possible.

When you present the lowest common denominator internet user with hundreds of instances to choose from and requiring them to think further than clicking through a sign-up page, you lose user interest pretty quickly.
- I’m actually okay with semi-centralized. Most people need that to trust a platform, but it still gives you the option to self host if you really care.

Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there'd be a flood.

Misskey has a more similar UI to Twitter, and it can't even get noticed by fediverse users.
- But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you're a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).
  
  For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.
In what regards what normies would use of the featureset, they are identical tho - pretty much everything is identical these days. Log in, go to your timeline / flood / jeep / whatever, click "post new", copy-paste a meme, hit toot / blarg / weep / whatever. There. Done.

99% of people use the exact same 1% of the features of a service.

So what, should we have a website where you push a button and it sends you to a random instance to sign up?

Just imagine the surprise when a new user is placed in hexbear or one of the porn servers.
- Then it was fate and they should just accept it.
  
  Sorting Hat for Lemmy?
- oof, i learned about hexb the hard way, so i feel for these hypothetical users already.
Yes honestly, we can manage what instances are pooled for on boarding.
The idea would be the servers would have shared ban/block lists and similar rules so that they can share the load of having open sign ups.

Basically a coop of instances to improve on-boarding. If you join the coop then you get added to the pool of instances that get assigned normies at random.

If the authentication was federated it’d be ideal as well but I assume this would be outside the scope of AP and would cause issues if you tried to post from your mastodon.social account from mastodon.world’s server for instance.
- The authentication could be another service, split from Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, ... that only gave that service. The instance asks the auth server about "user@instance: password" and the server just says "OK/fail". That or sending the user to the auth server to get a session cookie.
See my reply to u/Rentlar, but for most users, yes, the easier the onboarding, the more accessible it is; the more people won’t immediately run away because they’re afraid they’ll make the wrong choice.
Or you make it like a traditional website with an API used by people making frontends, but the backend (the database) is decentralized, just like regular websites but instead of having a bunch of servers owned by AWS it's just a bunch of people providing storage space on their servers.
- What would be the incentive for people to do that?
  
  What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?
  
  What is the incentive for people to share files via peer to peer networks?
  
  What is the incentive for people to host Minecraft servers?
  
  Need me to go on?
  
  If in your mind the only incentive that people have to host instances is to have power over it and its users then they're exactly the kind of people you don't want to see hosting instances.
  
  What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?
  
  I liked the community that had built up and wanted to help that continue.
  
  Well, in a system like I'm talking about, adding your server and storage space in the mix would make the whole thing more reliable and add to the storage capacity so more content can be hosted/backed up, just like paying for a second server to host a website allows to store more stuff and to start creating backups. You would still help build the community (the website), you just wouldn't have an administrative role outside of the communities you would want to moderate.

joinmastodon.org (the 'official' way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So... I guess that's not a barrier after all.

Yeah, they've implemented this a while ago, this year IIRC. People are on old information bashing Mastodon.

This is the exact reason email never took off. /s

Email was invented in 1983.

It was revolutionary, the utter example of a "killer app" that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.

Now there are 6,000,000,000 "killer" apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit "install" and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.

Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an "all in one" solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn't want things easy.

Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.

Just log onto mastodon.social and be done with it. That's the one that will still be running until the they turn out the lights on the service, I figure. And then go kick in a buck or two a month on Patreon to help defray development and server costs. (Not being the product is worth a donation by itself, I figure.)

The best thing for on-boarding are topic-specific instances, it makes picking one much easier.

Why can't mastodon influencers create content on how easy it is to pick a server.

Ah make it like a food hall and anthropo the servers as food.

You don't have to choose. Joinmastodon.org chooses for you, and you can choose one yourself as well but only if you want to.

mastodon.social exists

It's literally there to take the choice away from new users

Somebody definitely needs to make a frontend that makes it smooth.

I mean, it's a network of indeoendent websites. I'm not sure what kind of solution to this people want.

People seem to be able to choose which wrbsite they're signing up for when looking at Twitter, BlueSky, and Threads. It's not like it't that weird of an idea.

They even grok the idea that different Wordpress-based websites are different from each other!

Maybe if we stopped treating "Mastodon" as a space, and talked about it like the webhost software it is, people would understand.

It actually doesn't.

Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it's no more complicated than Twitter. It's just that nobody knows that.

Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It's no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.

Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won't be the bee's knees, and you won't know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it's easy-peasy.

As long as email has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.