I use twitter and I really like the furry art community on there. I also like Mastodon or related ActivityPub services.
Due to recent events lots of people search for alternatives and I feel just very frustrated see all those artists looking for Zucks Threads or Jacks Bluesky when Mastodon is right there, without a chance of a twitter situation ever happening again. They seem to avoid Mastodon like cats avoiding water.
What have we done wrong, and how can we make it better.
Wait what? Seriously? This was not a thing back when I created my account.
This is something I’ve been thinking about, imagine you have no experience with Mastodon, and you go to an instance that looks good. You go to sign up and you are hit with a form saying “Please leave a message with your application”.
Of course, we know that it’s just for rooting out bots and obvious trolls, but without that experience, it looks like you are being judged as to whether you are a good “fit” for the community. Most people’s experiences with “applications” are for jobs, university, that sort of thing, where you need to convince someone that you are good enough to join them.
Some smaller instances have applications. This is not a feature used by any site looking to be larger or general interest.
Complaining about it is a bad faith argument and points to the argurer having not even tried the main servers.
Want to be in a niche community? Be prepared to demonstrate you belong there.
I honestly do not understand niche mastodon servers. I follow the users I want to follow, no matter on what instance they are and finding new users happens by the retoot of users they find interesting. I just see no reason why it would matter that they are all on the same instance as me.
The ‘local’ timeline is probably more useful on niche servers.
Might also flavor your federated feed and make finding others in the niche more likely.
Also if the niche is of an unpopular or marginalized or nsfw sort, you’ll know the local moderation will be more amenable to what you want to post about.
But in general it doesn’t super matter, no.
Yeah I don’t view instances in terms of content but rather in user experience. I chose kbin because I tried a few and liked it. I like a lot of options to curate my own feed both in maximum possible sources and ability to block sources. If I moved to another instance it would likely be around that type of ideal. That being said Im sorta lazy.
To be clear, I’m not really complaining about it. I actually think this is something that should be normalized and is good for social media platforms (as opposed to verifying you based on phone number or photograph or nonsense).
I’m just saying that Mastodon and Lemmy are the only platforms where this kind of thing is relatively widespread, and it does act as a hurdle for those who have never seen this kind of thing before.