I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I’d like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:
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I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
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The content and style of each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances with lengthy domains.
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Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.
These reasons prompted me to explore more decentralized networks, I mean truly decentralized networks, such as Nostr.
However, creating a Nostr account and saving the Recovery Phrases is challenging (I lost my first Nostr account due to the loss of Recovery Phrases). And generally speaking, the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.
I believe people should leave Twitter due to shadowbans and robots and Facebook due to privacy concerns, but I’m struggling to choose a platform to migrate to. Each has its drawbacks, making it difficult to decide.
I’d love to hear your opinions on this.
About this particular problem, I see no reason to not join the largest instance in any case. Sheer discoverability of content is massively improved from sitting in the biggest pool, as I still have to subscribe to the communities I want to see.
It’s the Fediverse, not the Decentriverse.
If everyone joined the largest instance, then the decentralized aspect would become kinda moot. That would give lots of power to the owner of that instance, almost like on centralized social media.
Of course, but for the user, there’s signifcant upsides to doing that unless the underlying system can essentially make the barriers between instances invisible.
Now of course this is a Lemmy-specific thing. Reddit benefitted massively from stumbling into amazing commuities and discussions, and hence sitting in the largest pool is quite useful.
I’d agree. Having one large instance isn’t necessarily bad. Yes, it gives the admins quite some power, but they’re obviously doing something right there. And the federated aspect is still baked into the software and present. Once they act out, all the content is replicated everywhere else and people can just switch to another instance. This isn’t the same like a centralized platform. Even if people mainly use one instance.
My advice is to join a cental hub in the network if you’re interested in a very broad range of content, and a specialized hub if you have more particular interests. The relationship between for example lemmy.world and startrek.website is a great example.
I think a lot of the perceived complexity of the fediverse is that it’s not just a social network, but a network of social networks. You’d want to start out on a node that reflects your interests; if that interest is merely “more content”, make it a central one.
If you want to be on a tiny or self hosted Mastodon instance it might even make sense to build the base of your network on a central network hub first, and then migrate when you already have rooted yourself in the network.