A good solution I can see is "choose an interest", with each public mastodon instance having some cheeky emoji and tagline in a list. So if someone typed "makeup" they might filter to the mastodon instance "beauty.social", instead of needing to find beauty.social before even getting started with creating an account.

The risk of this approach is that you are not picking an interest. You are picking an environment with a set of rules and regulation, an environment that has certain physical constraints (response time, scaleability), an environment that decides which instances you can federate with.

Try explaining that with an emoji and a fun tagline.

Then they type "clubbing" or "cars" or "<insert city>" or whatever and see a shit ton of other instances they get to choose from.

This is a *BAD THING* and it's not surprising people here on HN don't see that.

A person typically have multiple interests. Associating yourself with a single interest is usually a bad idea as sooner or later your would want to talk about something else.

It would be way more natural to have interests as channels for a person's account. People could subscribe to only particular interests instead consuming the full stream of the person's posts. I'm not sure if Mastodon supports this, but it's sorely lacking in Twitter.

It's actually infuriating to read. If it's harder than "App downloaded, account made" then you've already lost. Anything more complex than that is a complete non-starter.

Lost what, exactly ? Contrary to the capitalistic world of Twitter, where bigger faster is always better, the fediverse is not about that. If you don't want to adapt and are just trying to recreate Twitter, it's a complete non-starter.

Lost the ability to actually reach people. Lost the ability to actually talk with people in your communities. Lost the ability for fucking anybody who isn't a wizard to know how to even read something. I mean Jesus, bulletin boards are easier than this.

How did you lose anything ? The fediverse is one way to communicate. IRC, email, BBS, gopher are all ways plebiscited by fediverse enthusiasts to also communicate because there is no one tool that can do everything. If mastodon is not for you, use something else; no one blames you

>IRC, email, BBS, gopher

You need to take a step back, and look at what the average Joe is actually using. Don't assume that because your programmer friends use these obscure protocols for everyday communication that everyone is.

So average Joe can keep using whatever they're using, fine ! There is no obligation for them to migrate, and there is no reason underpaid overworked volunteers should make it easy for Joe to switch, especially if Joe is not open to change.

If bigger/faster/better isn't the goal of the fediverse, then let's stop talking about it right now. All this incoming hype is about Elon and Twitter. Let's agree to stop talking about it. And especiallyt the fediverse needs to step up and say, "We're not a twitter replacement" instead of all this "Welcome aboard! You're in control! Democratize information!" snake oil that they're fueling.

Everyone in the fediverse community says "we're not a twitter replacement". It's a space for taking back control of communication. You don't join the fediverse, you are a part of it and contribute to build it.

I don't know where you got that snake oil but it doesn't reflect the pulse that's been there for years.

They have websites, dont they ?

I’d like to see us get back to using domain names for identity. An influencer celeb could have their own domain and their entire website would be “followed” to provide “updates”

All of their content could be self-hosted: videos, music, ebooks, etc. It’s a rails server, so in theory all of that stuff could be baked in.

> Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host.

Why would you do that in the first place? They can self-host if they want.