[TheBrokenRail]

> Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from.

This is kind of terrible.

Now instead of just putting in your emails you have to make an impactful choice that won't be terribly easy to reverse. Now you have to check which instances have sane moderation, which instances actually have funding so they won't just die on you, which instances are fast or slow, which instances have blocked which other instances, and all the other inevitable petty drama between them. And again, this is compared to just putting in your email and not thinking about it.

And this isn't even inherent to federation either! Matrix has an officially-endorsed default homeserver for people who just want to create an account (most people). You don't have to understand federation to use Matrix, it's available if you want it, but you could live without understanding any of it. This causes Matrix to have a much better on-boarding experience.

[jdlshore]

> won’t be terribly easy to reverse

As far as I know, migrating servers is in fact very easy. I haven’t done it myself, but there’s a big button to click in the interface to do so.

Learning that removed a lot of the anxiety I had about being on the “wrong” server. Although I’ve been perfectly happy with my choice (mastodon.online), and even gave them a year subscription at about $9/mo.

[allenbrunson]

> As far as I know, migrating servers is in fact very easy. I haven’t done it myself, but there’s a big button to click in the interface to do so.

i have, in fact, tried pressing that button. the experience is pretty terrible.

i made a backup of my original account's data, as suggested. went through all the steps. despite that, i lost all my posts, and all the accounts i was following that did not also follow me back. and that information did not exist in the backup i made.

(i am not arguing against mastodon, by the way! i am still a happy user. but it has a lot of warts.)

this is making me think that my contribution to the fediverse might be to write a tool that does a real migration, the way you would expect it to be done.

[jdlshore]

Good to know! Thanks for sharing your experience.