Problem with Mastodon is 1/the name 2/ "pods". I simply forgot which damn pod I signed up to and most people are simply unwilling to understand what the hell is a "pod". People just want on url where to sign up to.

I think you might be thinking of FunkWhale re: "pods". They're just called instances in Mastodon.

Although your point is taken, instances can be a stumbling block.

I think the email analogy works well here. You can choose Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail depending on what service you like better, but you can chat with whoever you like regardless of what email service they use. Heck, you can host your own email if you like!

Re: the "just want one url" concern, there's joinmastodon.org

Still wondering if the Mastodon community couldn't turn this into an advantage. Right now, users are mostly confused why there is no common way to sign up for "Mastodon" as you did for Twitter.

Usually, in the end, they sign up at the first instance they know through media or the one where all their friends are. This leads to large instances becoming ever larger and eventually risking being overloaded.

So if new users don't care about instances and just want a central entrypoint and if the Mastodon community cares a lot about instances and wants to avoid huge instances dominating or getting overloaded - why not build some central "entrypoint" where users can sign-up and which will assign users to an instance?

The selection could be done via user-centric features - e.g. preference, areas of interest, friends, location, etc - but could also be constrained by the amount of new users that instances are willing to accept.

An instance could register with this service and offer e.g. a contingent of 500 slots for new accounts. Then the service could include the number of free slots for each instance into the calculation and eventually selects an instance which satisfies the user's preferences while also balancing new users between all instances.

I've definitely thought about this.

Or even doing like a pottermore/buzzfeed-style quiz to "sort" you into an instance.

Honestly, I think the people that would bristle most about this are the instances themselves. I imagine that the vast majority of them dread the idea of having an influx of people who are joining the instance with little thought as to the existing community.

Some are probably more amenable to this, but those are likely to be the large general instances like mastodon.social and mas.to, but they are already huge.

> Honestly, I think the people that would bristle most about this are the instances themselves.

Yeah, I can imagine that - which is why the instances would have to be in control here. E.g., require that an instance explicitly registers with the service before you start assigning users to them. Also that's why I think it's important that instances announce how many new users there are willing to take.

Of course, this could lead to new problems, e.g. the service could be a target for malicious instances: Make an instance, stuff it full of (your own) bots that promote some sort of MLM or crypto scam, then have the entrypoint service supply you with a steady stream of gullible users.

Or alternatively, use the service to quickly grow large, then sell data from your users, employ accounts from your instance as spambots, etc.

So such an entrypoint would somehow have to balance the interests of the users and the interests of the instances.

That's not the problem, that is the point of ""mastadon"".

My favorite thing about mastodon: I'm not asked to sign up as I scroll down the page.

Twitter got rid of that right after the Musk takeover.

(Although I think a softer version of it reappeared for a short bit…)

There's still a persistent bar at the bottom of the page.

Hmm no, i see the popup all the time, including today. Sometimes its full screen, sometimes just a window, and about 1/4 of the time it cannot be closed without redirecting to sign up

Same here. I’ve seen no change in this behaviour since Elon took over.

Isn't that one of the first thing Hotz was suppose to get rid of?

He can't even get rid a simple popup?

Seems like John Mastodon will soon be the richest man on earth.

We like to call him by his pen name, Cowboy Bebop.

Are all Mastodon instances indexed somewhere? Last time i tried to look at all the communities, i only found about 30 on their main website.

Usually fediverse.space is the place to go but it seems down atm.

fediverse.party also has this information.

also more info here https://chaos.social/@leah/99837391793032137

I signed up just to follow elonjet. The reality is a large portion of people will sign up, check it a few times and then just continue to use Twitter.

Lots of the people proclaiming they are leaving Twitter for Mastodon didn't even last a week before they were posting on Twitter again.

Never count on your fellow man to have a strong constitution.

It is a bit sad seeing millions of users behave like that. But on the positive side it serves as an effective signal for muting.

I still don’t see how it’s a rival when the whole instance and moderating system is more akin to Discord or Reddit

Just because there is a flat timeline to post doesn’t make it a Twitter rival

The content format is basically identical. I think claiming that it’s not a rival based on technical implementation details isn’t giving it enough credit.

You can also think about alternatives like Truth Social and Parler essentially cloning the Twitter content format, aren’t they also Twitter rivals? Couldn’t they be seen as different “instances” of Twitter with different moderation standards given that their functionality is basically identical?

In other words, the conversation should move away from “How does this work on a technical level?” and more toward “what value does this have for me?”

The truth is that Mastodon, regardless of instancing, holds the same value proposition as Twitter. It’s a legitimate alternative.

IIRC, truth social is a custom mastodon instance.

For comparison, Twitter has 237M daily active users. So even assuming MAU=DAU, that's about 1%.

It's 8.7M actually.

https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount