this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.
Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.
The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.
The email experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
No that decision is, for most people, made for them. You use the server provided for you by your ISP/work/university or the one that's associated with logging into your smartphone.
For e-mail, it does not really make a difference.
Your email server doesn't also run the group email list and all the join/drop/approve/ban operations. And if you bring your own email domain name, you can go somewhere else and get no disruption. But if you sign up for me@hotmail.com and hotmail bans you, you'll lose all your connections and conversation history.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board, or a messaging service group. It's apples and rocket ships.
Bluesky is offering simple one-stop answers to a lot of these concerns. Fediverse needs to answer all these, plus address the whole long-term financial sustainability question.
Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.
"How can I send Gmails?"
just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved
What happens when their server expenses aren't covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
And getting a whole community moved over... oof.
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies. It took two years to convince people on to Signal, and 2/3 of the people didn't make the jump. And this was with a small group of people who knew each other IRL. Imagi e doing that for tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide.
This is why people are hesitant to get off Meta/Twitter. They're not going to do it again.
What happens when BlueSky does this?
Answering your own question there.
Just to be clear... I'm a massive Fediverse fan, and have concerns about BSKY's governance. But many communities streaming off Twitter seem to be heading toward BSKY because it's a shallower on-ramp.
Mastodon people recognize this and are working to smooth down the friction points.
I'm so tired of this nonsense. The very simple answer is "literally any server". It really doesn't matter. At this point most apps have a default server.
Except it does matter. Your choice of server affects what content you’re allowed to see and what people you’re allowed to interact with.
Yes but no, not really. Most instances federate with all the same other instances.
Exactly! And even if a person gets it wrong, you're encouraged to make an account elsewhere without fault or foul. That's what I did. And what was I looking for when deciding on a server? "A general purpose server." Oh, look World seems to be it, what a coincidence that it's the top suggestion. lol...