this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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If you Google "sign up for mastodon" the first result you get is a sign-up page for mastodon.social which is the default instance. The sign up page is straight forward. I get we're all coddled by iPads or whatever but this argument evades me.
What is instance? There are two buttons - sign up for mastodon or choose another instance, I just want to register etc etc.
People dont care for decentralization, they want to sign up and share a link.
Listen I just don't have sympathy for it at this point. If people insist on maintaining iPad-only tech literacy then they can catch up with any average intelligence 4 year old.
Cool. Doesn't change the fact that for a regular joe, "sign up" is what they want to click and then share a link or follow some guy. Not do research on what platform to join, what instance, what's an instance, what happens if you join a wrong one. The fediverse is a gimmick that most people don't need.
Trump's gaggle of tech bros loves this opinion
Loves this fact. Fify
In every other aspect of society, choice is heralded as a good thing, a fundamental aspect of freedom even. We were supposed to believe that having a range of different brands of toothpaste is fundamentally a good thing, and people happily choose which ones they want. We vote, it's freedom.
Fundamentally federation is freedom as compared to centralised networks that lock you in. You can choose where to go and you never get locked in because you can choose to move instances later on - in particular Mastodon lets you take your followers with you.
If people can't spend 15 minutes making a decision on something they're going to spend probably hundreds of hours a year on, what does that say?
People figured out email, and that's essentially the same set of choices - you get an email provider, you don't go to "centralemail.com" where you can only communicate with people on that same locked in-platform.
The whole thing about people "not wanting to pick an instance" is just a bad meme. It's all about marketing and the fact Bluesky and its predecessors like Twitter and Facebook had the money to chuck around to attract people to the platform by e.g. paying off influencers to join.
It's also the case that BS aspires to be a federated platform (see: ATProto) - apparently it wants exactly the same "problems" that Mastodon has!
But, you know, will inevitably do something shitty with respect to that because VC funding.
People don't like to read.