[allan-a]

Just a small note, you can't really choose wrong because you can participate across the fediverse, with other "servers", and even non-mastodon federated social media. However if it irks one to join a specific community, there does exist general purpose instances.

[DavidSJ]

If I can’t choose wrong then why am I forced to choose at all? The user experience doesn’t add up.

[afiori]

The "not choosing" option is to run your own instance.

You are forced to chose because there is not a central blessed server that acts as a main hub.

[lrvick]

You chose an area code for your phone number. Often people choose area codes from a home state as a bit of nostalgia or affinity, but in the end you can use any number to talk to any number, so it really does not matter much.

In Mastodon you can choose a french server if you are french and agree with generally accepted french values of moderation, or you can choose a general purpose server, or host your own.

There are a lot of LGBT servers and special interest servers with strict moderation, and general purpose servers that moderate very little.

It is also a bit like choosing what city to live in... except it is -much- easier to move if you decide you do not like the vibe and wish to live somewhere else. Mastodon has built-in user forwarding to take your follows and followers with you.

[dymk]

I’ve never been given a choice for my area code, and if I was, there’s the obvious default to “where I live”. What’s the Mastodon equivalent?

[lrvick]

There are many country and geographic specific mastodons.

[xaduha]

Who should decide it for you then? Did someone mention blockchain already?

But seriously though, if you start to make it more distributed than it already is it will look even less like Twitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)

[phire]

Most users don't care how distributed it is, or what it's architecture looks like.

They just want to sign up, and get an out-of-the box experience more or less like twitter.

[lrvick]

If Mastodon was fully centralized like Twitter and offered that experience, it would need an immense source of funding, and need ads, and shareholders, and would be losing money rapidly until some billionare bought it out... like Twitter.

Mastodon is built so that there is no single point of failure, but that means users have no single point of signup. It is like email, or matrix. Host your own on your own domain for a few dollars a month or join a friendly server paying the bill for you.

It is really not that hard, but people are just not used to having choices on the internet anymore.

At some point someone you know picked Twitter and you did too. Maybe find some friends or public figures you like on Mastodon and see what server they are on.

[jazzyjackson]

isn't the whole point of federated service that I don't have to be on the same server as people I'm following?

[lrvick]

Of course. I only suggest that for people that cannot decide what server to choose.

[xaduha]

If they don't care, then they should stay on Twitter. There isn't a better option right now than Mastodon/ActivityPub.

[arjvik]

If there's no wrong answer between Gmail and Outlook, why must you choose one of them?

[xaduha]

You have a good analogy attempt there, but you didn't quite nail it I think, because Outlook is also an email client.

It's more like if someone asked why they need to choose between [e-mail] address or [e-mail], but in reality email would work just fine regardless.

EDIT: fixed

[tedunangst]

Except for all the people with outlook.com addresses.

[arjvik]

Yup, you're right. I guess I was specifically referring to outlook.com, Microsoft's hosted email solution for consumers.

[neogodless]

I haven't figured out this part. I joined the default server years ago. All of the other servers want a unique account, as I cannot login using my existing account.

How do I "participate across the fediverse" without creating one account per server? Is there a part of the UI I just haven't stumbled on yet?

[lrvick]

You cannot use your gmail credentials to login to yahoo, but you can communicate with anyone from yahoo with your gmail account.

Similarly servers do not share credentials, but you can follow people no matter what server they are on.

[jrnichols]

It's finding people to follow that are on different servers. That's the thing. A lot of servers have their content for users only, and if you don't have an account on those servers, you don't know who to follow.

there's a lot of chicken & egg issues still going on. I think it'll get better as more people put their info on their web pages, though.