[jszymborski]

I think you might be thinking of FunkWhale re: "pods". They're just called instances in Mastodon.

Although your point is taken, instances can be a stumbling block.

I think the email analogy works well here. You can choose Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail depending on what service you like better, but you can chat with whoever you like regardless of what email service they use. Heck, you can host your own email if you like!

Re: the "just want one url" concern, there's joinmastodon.org

[xg15]

Still wondering if the Mastodon community couldn't turn this into an advantage. Right now, users are mostly confused why there is no common way to sign up for "Mastodon" as you did for Twitter.

Usually, in the end, they sign up at the first instance they know through media or the one where all their friends are. This leads to large instances becoming ever larger and eventually risking being overloaded.

So if new users don't care about instances and just want a central entrypoint and if the Mastodon community cares a lot about instances and wants to avoid huge instances dominating or getting overloaded - why not build some central "entrypoint" where users can sign-up and which will assign users to an instance?

The selection could be done via user-centric features - e.g. preference, areas of interest, friends, location, etc - but could also be constrained by the amount of new users that instances are willing to accept.

An instance could register with this service and offer e.g. a contingent of 500 slots for new accounts. Then the service could include the number of free slots for each instance into the calculation and eventually selects an instance which satisfies the user's preferences while also balancing new users between all instances.

[jszymborski]

I've definitely thought about this.

Or even doing like a pottermore/buzzfeed-style quiz to "sort" you into an instance.

Honestly, I think the people that would bristle most about this are the instances themselves. I imagine that the vast majority of them dread the idea of having an influx of people who are joining the instance with little thought as to the existing community.

Some are probably more amenable to this, but those are likely to be the large general instances like mastodon.social and mas.to, but they are already huge.

[xg15]

> Honestly, I think the people that would bristle most about this are the instances themselves.

Yeah, I can imagine that - which is why the instances would have to be in control here. E.g., require that an instance explicitly registers with the service before you start assigning users to them. Also that's why I think it's important that instances announce how many new users there are willing to take.

Of course, this could lead to new problems, e.g. the service could be a target for malicious instances: Make an instance, stuff it full of (your own) bots that promote some sort of MLM or crypto scam, then have the entrypoint service supply you with a steady stream of gullible users.

Or alternatively, use the service to quickly grow large, then sell data from your users, employ accounts from your instance as spambots, etc.

So such an entrypoint would somehow have to balance the interests of the users and the interests of the instances.