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Comment by nightpaws | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is a difficult one. The decentralisation of users runs contrary to the natural predisposition people have toward following the crowd.

As the writer puts it, people need to use other instances, but (myself included as a guilty mastodon.social user) the comfort of being on the bigger boat draws people in since they think it’ll be the last to sink.

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One way to discourage following the crowd would be to level the playing field by making hosting/instances kind of invisible. For example, if each person has their own domain then it wouldn't be obvious where people are hosted (and it solves the identity migration problem).

I really like that idea.

It could be implemented very easily by using DNS SRV records or HTTPS .well-known URIs.

The original OpenID [1] took that path (see "OpenID delegation"), and as an identity tool made sense for an ID intended for bloggers who would be expected a modicum of technical talent including buying their own domains (on which to host their blogs).

The criticism that applies to that original OpenID model would apply here too that buying and controlling a domain is a level of technical expertise two or three steps up the "internet user" ladder (especially without another reason to have a domain such as blogging as a motivating factor) and could gatekeep the platform from a large percentage of potential users.

[1] Not to be confused with anything called OpenID today.

I'm not sure about that. Hosting companies like Dreamhost, GoDaddy, Squarespace, etc. have "consumerized" the process of registering domains so that it's little harder than signing up for Facebook. The bigger barrier is probably that domains are not free.

Those sort of providers existed in the blogging age as well (WordPress, Blogger, etc). Certainly that's a start, but think which of those then have "consumerized" SRV records or .well-known files yet? That's why the analogy used was a ladder, and that this involved multiple steps up. Individually most of the way from one step to the next is "easy" and "consumerized" somewhere, but each additional step along the way is still a barrier to less technical users.

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