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Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

This highlights why I’m so far not on Mastodon: Decision fatigue.

How do I find a server that ‘matches’ me but doesn’t make me seem like an over-enthusiastic single-issue or single-hobby dedicant - and also isn’t run by someone whose (perhaps currently unespoused) views I’d find problematic?

Maybe I should just join what seems to be the default (because of its friendly domain?) of http://mastodon.social. But that seems defeat the purpose of decentralization - and (without evidence) I don’t really trust that mastodon.social is set up to handle the huge influx of users at the moment…

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You actually can't sign up on mastodon.social at the moment. I thought the same, all the instances are for weirdly specific groups I'm not in. You don't have this problem with email, there's no requirement to choose an email address that matches your political tendencies, sexual kinks etc.

I eventually chose fosstodon.org which seems like about the most vanilla thing that's open to new users and where I have a decent claim to being the right kind of person. I suspect a lot of people will look at the long list of furry-centric instances and conclude Mastodon is not for them. IDK, maybe that's considered a feature.

But it really is the same with mastodon. You don't need to find an instance that matches your political tendencies, furry niche, or whatever.

Just pick one that feels right. Maybe you are French or Korean and like a server in French or Korean, or maybe you feel very strong about politics: the make that a parameter. Otherwise just go for any "general" server.

Just like with email, people will generally just pick Hotmail, AOL, xs4all.nl, yahoo or email, without much thought. This is fine.

You can easily move later if you ever find a community that you wish to be part of.

> Otherwise just go for any "general" server

That's exactly what I tried, and failed, to do. As far as I was able to discover, including via the site being discussed here, there are no such servers currently available for new signups.

I'm sorry to hear that. The influx is big currently. Many servers can barely handle all the signups and extra load.

So this is temporary, and certainly not a fundamental issue.

Thank you! This is a much, much better response than the denialism I'm seeing in other replies.

I’m not convinced that this is a temporary issue - the mastodon servers seem to require relatively high upkeep (cost, cpu, and manual time) for relatively few users, which naturally leads to instances reducing/blocking new accounts and even just shutting down, which further exacerbates the load on other instances.

As I wrote in an earlier thread[1], this indeed is a problem. With mastodon.

But as numerous people replied, many alternatives are ready or wip. Many of them make hosting really easy. Since that thread I tried several. Gotosocial being my favorite, now.

So this too isn't fundamental. Because 'mastodon' is about much more than this one piece of software. It's a network, the fediverse. And you can easily host a near 1-1 mastodon alternative today on a cheap, VPS.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136&p=2#33120419

You and a lot of other people. I see this blind spot in the open source community from time to time regarding decision paralysis and I'm surprised that more people don't realize how much of an issue it is for a lot of users.

I don't want to think about what server I'm on. I want the whole thing to just work. The fact that there is only one Twitter and only one Facebook are actually advantages in the marketplace for those services.

> I don't want to think about what server I'm on.

Maybe I’m the exception but for me almost without exception the answer is that I want to run my own instance.

What’s the point of leaving a centralized system for a decentralized one if you still let someone else own your data?

People aren't mass-leaving Twitter because Twitter owns their data. They were happy with someone else owning their data to the extent that they were users of Twitter. They're mass-leaving Twitter becomes Elon Musk bought Twitter. Elon Musk cannot buy Mastodon. He might buy your particular server, but the chances he'd try to are much more remote because the benefit of doing so is much less.

Agreed. I've been pasting this anywhere I see the frustration

Think of it like your phone number, it's a service and you need a provider. Choose one by location https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094 makes no difference, they all talk to each other and you can move servers at any time

And it's curated for servers that are open for registration so hopefully no dead ends

Totally this. Did decision fatigue stop you from using email? It didn't because they all talk. It doesn't really matter which you choose.

This is especially true now that there is an official system to change/move servers.

I've been using Mastodon on and off for a few years now and the thing that bugged me was that the benefits it was pushing at first were absolutely uninteresting to me as a user: it's decentralized and you can pick your server. Those aren't exactly things a general user is going to care about or even understand. They just want to know how to sign up and follow interesting people. The fact that there wasn't any trending (or usable search) for a while made it also feel like a ghost town. You create your new account and look around and think, "Okay, where's the activity?" I suppose it wasn't really meant to be twitter, so my criticisms may not be entirely fair.

you pick your server and see if they approve your account too. This was an issue that I encountered. I made accounts on a couple different instances but didn't make it through their approval process and had no idea why.

Should just lead with advice "CHOOSE THE FIRST YOU LIKE AND CHANGE IT LATER".

Opine:

The "tell me what to think" motivation is frustrating from multiple perspectives:

- overt bias of the Tellers is rife with unethical potential

- low engagement of the Users is a part of communication, it's reality and why the style of Exciting Content (insert emojis) has become popular in modern communication vs the 'respectably formatted and spell-checked' of yesteryear

Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?

This is what freedom looks like, vs going to a defacto centralized megacorp and having them tell you where to live so that they can most efficiently manipulate and spy on you for profit.

Everyone has become far too accustomed with exploitative corpos telling them what to do on the internet. Choices are harder, but healthier.

Just make a choice, and you can make a different one later.

When you move because you don't like the instance anymore, how do all of your connections follow you?

This, to me, is the central problem in the Fediverse.

> When you move because you don't like the instance anymore, how do all of your connections follow you?

You use the built-in[0] migration feature. Create an account on your new instance, point it at your old one. Then point your old account to your new one.

[0] Built in to Mastodon, anyway. YMMV with other Fediverse software.

And if the instance-administrator on the old account decides they don't like you and drops the account or points it to /dev/null?

That risk exists at everything you do not host yourself on the internet.

The risk is very small for email when you own your own domain. One can switch "instances" at will with just a DNS update.

You can do this with Mastodon too. Point a domain at one of many managed mastodon services or host your own.

> Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?

Yes, of course. That involves a mortgage, location, the logistics of moving...

Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?

Yes! Doesn’t everyone to some degree? That’s a huge decision that takes me days to decide.

Just make a choice, and you can make a different one later.

If we’re going with a housing analogy, this is pretty terrible advice. But I don’t think the housing analogy really applies. Where someone lives says (in my mind) a lot less about them - but is also a much more important personal decision.

You’ve implied a few times in this thread that complaints about Mastodon are because people are somehow accustomed to being told what to do by corporations. That is quite hyperbolic, and I also don’t really think it’s true.

I don’t see how caring about what a public choice appears to say about me has anything to do with that.

Decisions can be big but still easily reversible. And it makes sense to not hesitate with those, I think.

That is indeed something I've applied to buying an apartment in the past. I bought an apartment and ended up not liking it too much, so I sold it and bought a different one a few years later. Now I'm thinking about selling it again and buying something in a different part of the world. I don't see why making a choice and making a different one later is bad advice here.

Of course, there are choices that are difficult to reverse. Then some hesitation makes sense in my opinion.

Exactly. Think hard about marriage or a tattoo. A mastodon server? Who has time to stress about that. Pick anything and pick another one later.

That would be easier, of course, if your name followed you.

Mastodon could probably use a directory service independent of the network service.

When you move mastodon servers your followers and follows go with you to your new username so yous name kind of does follow you.

It is a bit like snail mail forwarding address.

I agree a directory server is probably a good call. It proved to be useful in Matrix.

I drove to the bay area on a Friday, looked at three apartments on a Saturday, and moved in Monday.

When I was ready to buy a home, I looked at one, made an offer, and bought it.

Life is a lot easier when you know your practical success criteria and are decisive when something meets it.

I truly think most people today are too accustomed to letting algorithms live their lives for them.

> How do I find a server that ‘matches’ me but doesn’t make me seem like an over-enthusiastic single-issue or single-hobby dedicant

Just don't care about it that much, really. My main account has been at https://functional.cafe for years now, but I'm posting about pretty much everything there: programming, music, art, politics, current events, shitposting.

> and also isn’t run by someone whose (perhaps currently unespoused) views I’d find problematic?

Ask someone from your friend circle who's already on Fediverse, but also see the above point.

Just don’t care about what the first thing people will see that’s specifically about me says about me? I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.

Then signing up for a general instance (mastodon.social, mas.to, etc.) makes sense. It's like (as in exactly like) signing up for gmail vs. having a custom domain.

https://mastodon.social/ isn't allowing new signups, https://mas.to/ is returning a cloudflare error page for me.

It's an exceptional growth period for the servers. Twitter used to have failwhales, and gmail used to require invitations. It will stabilize. (And, if you happen to be interested and have the skillset, you could deploy your own instance. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already a VPS provider that already has pushbutton mastodon deployment in place.)

So, it's exactly like signing up for gmail if gmail was down and you had to either wait for them to fix it at some undetermined point in the future, find another email provider or set up your own email server instead.

Much of the history of the Internet has been exactly like that. New services (or new-you-you) constantly going down with an influx of new users, services (like email) that allow anyone to set up their own machine ... this mild and temporary inconvenience is familiar. A week from now it will be fine.

But I think that's the important point. Right now, there's nothing wrong with Mastodon. Mastodon is working fine. A couple of servers that people commonly encounter first are having growth issues. But those servers aren't Mastodon any more than Gmail is email.

Well, I would say it's a problem that a lot of people are trying to join the fediverse and it's currently quite difficult and confusing to do so.

I would further say there's a marketing problem that Mastodon advocates keep saying this situation is normal, expected and it's working fine, which is obviously quite offputting.

It is a community project, there isn't a centralized marketing message or anything like that. If the community is growing as fast as their servers can handle it, that seems like a fine situation?

I sincerely hope it can conquer its current growth and signup issues and the unnecessary reputational damage inflicted by its advocates.

> A couple of servers that people commonly encounter first are having growth issues. But those servers aren't Mastodon any more than Gmail is email.

And that's what a lot of tech people don't get, to normies actually Gmail does equal Email and such. You're not going to get the bulk of everyday people on these platforms until you think in their shoes and provide features (and don't have downtime on your main servers) that fit their experiences.

> to normies actually Gmail does equal Email and such

I'd love to hear of some evidence for that. I've never encountered anyone assuming that the bit after the @ has to be gmail.com, or being unclear and uncertain if they can communicate between their work Outlook account and their home Gmail account. This feels very much like someone's taken the idea "to most people, the internet just is the web" and run wild with it.

My point stands Mastodon has a bad UX and no one I know wants to continue to use it. They were all pretty much immediately put off.

> So, it's exactly like signing up for gmail if gmail was down and you had to either wait for them to fix it at some undetermined point in the future, find another email provider or set up your own email server instead.

GMail was invite only for a very long time at the beginning fwiw

It's also exactly like when people on the right started leaving twitter and all these alternatives popped up.

And in the end, people (who left willingly) ended up back on twitter anyway just because people kept sharing things from there. But also because the alternative services could not keep up with the momentum, resulting in degraded service. So everyone seemed to collectively go "meh" and returned to twitter.

I predict everyone will be back on twitter once all this blows over, and especially if alternatives can't keep up. Uptime and reliability seem to be more important than features, freedom, or just about anything else.

Twitter used to have failwhales

I remember the failwhale days, but this is different.

Twitter is a VC-backed company that had the resources to build out their infrastructure.

Mastodon is a bunch of volunteer-run servers and it looks pretty obvious they aren’t going to be able to handle the infusion of new users… unless there’s an infusion of resources.

I’m on mastodon.social and it has slowed to a crawl, compared to what I was used to 6 months ago.

Also the UI/UX isn’t great. Say what you will about Twitter, but they’ve built a pretty slick web application and native apps. People used to the simplicity of Twitter are going to struggle, if the complaints on my Twitter timeline are any indication.

There is an infusion of resources. One option that seems common is that users aren't required to contribute towards hosting fees, but donations are easily accepted -- that is how the sustainable ones work from what I have seen. It seems to work pretty well?

It's very transparent, which I like -- "we got a bunch of new users, the server bill is going up $2k a month overall so if you can pitch in please do" is extremely clear and seems to work effectively. An individual server seems like it should be able to charge for hosting your account like with email if it needed to be operated like a business.

So far it doesn't really seem like it needs to operate like a business, it just takes longer for collectives of humans to respond to changes in needs than a giant enormously wealthy company that knew what would happen in advance. I'm sure it will equilibrate, it has the last two times this happened.

Mastohost offers fully-provisioned Mastodon hosting service:

<https://masto.host/>

Edit: And a few minutes after posting this, a wiki link showed up in my Masto stream with numerous suggestions and tips:

<https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...>

This problem is literally solved by OP. Search https://instances.social/list#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&min... for the whole list of instances accepting signups, choose the most generic-sounding name, check it out, register there.

Did you see the list? Finding a "generic" instance that's open to signups honestly isn't easy, right now. I ended up on fosstodon.org, which is not as generic as I'd like but seemed like the least terrible option I could find in half an hour.

How do I ensure I’m not picking one that won’t, now or in a few days or weeks or months end up being associated with views I find problematic?

What I’m worried about is my reputation - what the server I’m associated with tells others about me (the argument that those others are wrong in making assumptions doesn’t comfort me).

These hazards are probably very unlikely, of course, but the alternative of ‘how about I just avoid all these hazards’ is the one my lizard brain is picking.

I think you’re worrying too much about this particular point. If it becomes noxious, migrate later.

what's more likely to happen is that the instance will go offline for some reason and never come back. We had this happen with an adult material related instance. It became brigaded by another crew who flooded it with very illegal material. The users were helpless to do anything but report it, and soon the whole instance was gone.

It was a very unfortunate and frightening view into what can quickly happen with the fediverse.

Dude who cares. Unless youre like a popular figure or something whose going to go through the list of users and be like oh this particular user happens to be signed up to this site along with tens of thousands of other users but Im gonna find this person and trash talk them

The same thing was true of Twitter which is why so many are leaving.

Unlike Twitter, you can leave a Mastodon server for another one and take your follows and followers with you.

If you want assurances that a server owner will never act against your will, you need to take the same action you would to mitigate a landlord acting against your will. Buy your own place.

In a decentralized universe you have to start thinking of servers as real estate. Nothing is free but if your goal is to get to share with you what they paid for for free, you take what you can get. Or buy your own server for only yourself, or share with others.

This is what the world looks like without tracking and advertizing trying to make everything seem free.

This is not at all obvious, but it's fairly easy to move your Mastodon account and leave a forwarding notice behind: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

FWIW, most of us don't pay that much attention to it unless it's an instance with a very good or bad reputation, and even then, new users aren't really presumed to know what they signed up for.

If this is the best response hardcore fans of Mastodon can come up with, I don't have much hope.

This is 100% why I haven't signed up yet. It's like walking into a blockbuster video and being told, "you can pick one movie from this store, but everyone will know which movie you pick, and the director of that movie will be able to control what other movies you get to see."

The analysis paralysis this induces is incredible.

> and the director of that movie will be able to control what other movies you get to see

That’s not true though, is it?

Aren’t you able to consume content from anywhere else in the fediverse?

You can unless an admin specifically blocks another instance. It doesn't seem to be that common in practice (other than blocking the content that you'd expect to be blocked or, IIRC, a handful of servers that effectively de-federate).

It is more like you previously could -only- obtain movies from Blockbuster and you loved that they recommended sponsored movies whenever you visited. You did not have to think.

Now Blockbuster is gone and there are a pile of other ways to obtain movies out there and you are complaining that choosing one is hard. It is entertainment and they all have access to the same movies so it is not that important of a choice.

To me it's like the difference between living in an anonymous big city where I can do whatever I want without too many people yelling at me, and having to pick some village where everybody knows everybody and forces their rules on them. I would never choose the latter just by my own nature, so Mastodon will never be an alternative to twitter for me. Looking at that endless list of specialized echo chambers of some people with their own sub rules just makes me shudder immediately.

There are general servers that provide basically the same "anonymous in a big city" experience as Twitter (or at least, as much as Twitter did 10 years ago).

If you want to be on your own sovereign island you can host your own Mastodon instance or pay a monthly fee to one of the many Managed Mastodon providers and even use your own domain name.

It is not that much different from choosing an email provider.

You're overthinking it. Find an instance that seems friendly and sign up. If it turns out you don't like it there, you can migrate to another one; barring defederation issues, everyone who is following you on the old instance will follow you on the new one automatically. Unfortunately the list of people that you follow isn't automatically migrated, but some front ends reduce the pain of this by letting you export a list of follow-ees on the old instance and then import it on the new one.

Just do it!

That's such a strange piece of UX. As a typical user, who on average consumes content rather than produces it, what I care about is that my list of followed accounts migrates with me so that my feed stays relatively consistent. As a content producer I would also care about my past posts migrating with me, which they don't. Having followers continue to follow me after migration is only the primary concern for the "influencer". I get that "my friends can still find me" is an important feature but who thought it was ok to skip the other two?

Followed accounts are easier to do manually; there's a simple export / import interface that existed before the account move feature.

I will note that for you "as a content producer" the uniformly reverse chronological presentation on Mastodon highly penalizes older posts (even a day old!) to an extent that is pretty rough to get used to, and that makes those older posts pretty irrelevant to move over. This is much like Twitter before its engagement-maximization algorithm days, though.

It doesn't matter ... too much.

I've been on Mastodon since 2016. I've switched instances twice, once when the instance was shut down (the maintainer gave several months' notice), once when instance ownership changed.

The first time was early enough that profile migration didn't exist ... and it still wasn't much of a deal. I follow a few hundred profiles, and am followed by about 2,000. It turns out that it's pretty easy to re-associate, at least for individuals. (Commercial / brand profiles with large follow/follower lists would have a different experience.) We reconnected pretty easily.

The more recent switch used profile migration. This brings along your followers / following lists, as well as block and mute lists, and is straightforward. Toots are not migrated, but for the most part Mastodon "lives in the present", and the back-catalogue isn't particularly significant. (I care more about this than most, and ... it's still not that big a deal.)

I actually have several active profiles, though all are forwarded to my primary active one: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius>. Again, if I need to fallback to another instance, I can.

Larger instances tend to be fairly anodyne. Smaller instances tend to fit niches, of both specific interests and policies. Pick something that looks reasonable. If you decide you want to change at a later date, it's not a big deal.

100% this!

There doesn't seem to be many general servers that:

1. I can trust won't just shut down in a week.

2. Are accepting signups

3. And won't end up having a negative stigma a in year when the creator goes off a deep end. I know I can just switch to another instance, but I really don't want to have to do that frequently.

Matrix at least solves this by just having an official Matrix home-server. Matrix is still federated, but if you just want to just sign-up and join a chat room, you're not forced to pick a home-server that's specific to you or worry about the factors above.

I just want a public key. You can name me what you want or I can buy an easy-to-read username and renew it like a domain.

You have the choice to have any username you want on a domain you own.

*if you know how to manage and maintain a server

Or if you know how to pay someone else to do that for you.

I searched for managed mastodon and found plenty of options.

https://masto.host

https://toot.io

https://elest.io/open-source/mastodon

https://hostdon.jp/#/

https://federation.spacebear.ee/software/mastodon

https://ossrox.org/

https://weingaertner-it.de/

I expect many more will emerge now that demand is increasing.

The reason I just want a public key is because I don’t really own the account otherwise. I only own it if I self host it. If I rent from them, I’m just renting my account from these services. It’s actually worse than renting it from Twitter because people care less if smaller companies abuse you.

FYI: I had signed up years ago on mastoton.social and not really used it. I tried logging in a few days ago and it was struggling under the load. Sounds like the admin of that instance is buying hardware to support the new load.

You also can't:

- move your account to a different server

- use your account as a sign-on for other ActivityPub based services

- easily discover content that your server doesn't already know about

Your first point is wrong, you definitely can move your account to a new instance and take your followers with you.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move The docs, for anyone wondering.

That just moves followers, not the account, data, followings, posts, reputations, links to your account, etc.

Moving the accounts you follow (and block/mute settings) is on that page under a different heading. Setting up a profile redirect is also on that page under a different heading. It is correct that moving posts/other data is not possible. "Reputations" isn't a thing technically attached to an account.

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