[yuck39]

Exactly. I always thought Mastadon could have been so much more successful if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server.

Sure it would give Mastadon the power to pick and choose who it wants to host, but if you want to go join a different instance you are more than welcome to.

It would just substantially streamline the process for your mainstream user.

[nulbyte]

> Exactly. I always thought Mastadon could have been so much more successful if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server.

Relays serve this purpose. I use one on my personal one-user instance.

https://joinfediverse.wiki/index.php?title=Fediverse_relays&...

[kelseyfrog]

https://relay.fedi.buzz/

Worked as an interesting relay solution to my small instance. I relayed most of the instances which contain profiles I've subscribed to and it filled out my timeline considerably. Replies to remote posts aren't downloaded by default and this solved that problem.

[Ferkv]

> if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server.

I mean, isn't any instance in the federation already offering a proxied cache of the content of all other instances you access through it?

You can just register/login in mastodon.social website the same way you can register/login in Twitter, and then access cached copies of content from the entire fediverse compatible with Mastodon.

If you are gonna make new accounts connect through a global mainstream proxy, you might as well just let them connect through a global mainstream instance. I personally do not see the problem with one instance being more mainstream than the rest as long as federation is still respected. It's definitelly still an improvement over centralization and if it ever becomes a burden it'd be easier to migrate.

[riffic]

masto not masta

[sph]

The problem with Mastodon is that some people still don't know how to spell it properly. It's not rocket science.

[tester457]

The name okay. The problem is the friction new users have understanding and joing the platform.

[Macha]

Not so sure about that, people unable to spell YouTube seemed to do more harm to Universal Tubing who owned utube.com than it did YouTube. If you hadn't heard of them before, how many ts in Twitter? Is TikTok spelt with the letter c?

[bamfly]

People who've seen YouTube written down a couple times tend not to get it wrong. Twitter is a common dictionary word and I'd bet had a pretty low misspelling rate, if you'd asked people to spell it before the service Twitter even existed. TikTok, I think most people get after seeing it a few times, at worst.

Mastodon? It's a dictionary word, so it as that going for it—and yet, people see it a hundred times and still often misspell it. The pronunciation's just a bit too far from the spelling, at least in American English. Most folks say it as if it were spelt "mastadon", especially if they're not trying to enunciate carefully & precisely and (perhaps) don't know the correct spelling.

(I'm not weighing in on whether that's some kind of serious problem for Mastodon, but I do think it's worse than all your other examples, as far as likelihood of misspelling even after significant exposure—then again, web search smooths over most of that, for anything sufficiently popular)

[guraf]

You are being downvoted but I agree, what's with people spelling it mastadon? That's not even how it's pronounced (in my English but non American country, at least), so is it a language thing? Is mastadon a real word in some languages?

[antonyt]

In America its pronunciation is closer to "Mastadon." The second syllable sounds like "tuh."

You see the same thing with other words that have "o"s that function similarly. You'll hear Americans turning "o" into "uh" in Tyrann-o-saurus, p-o-tato, etc.

[sph]

But that's not how it's written, is it? Given that English pronunciation rules are very different than how words are written, I would have thought native speakers would learn to actually look at a word and imitate the order of graphemes.

Especially if we're talking about an Internet thing: you've seen it in written form more often than you have heard it enunciated out loud. And seems like the iOS text prediction is also able to spell it the right way.

I don't care honestly, but as a non native English speaker I've never understood why natives make an enormous amount of banal spelling errors.