mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

354K
active users

@neave @Mastodon I tried it and I can assure you it is not excellent.

@neave @Mastodon Yeah, it’s pretty bad. The very first random server it gave me says if you’re not in New Zealand or connected to it, you can’t sign up. If I’m a new user looking at Mastodon for the first time, that’s a giant turnoff for me. Especially if I don’t understand the server concept, which is frankly not well explained on the app’s splash screen.

mas.to/@MikeBeas/1098311887323

mas.toMike Beasley (@MikeBeas@mas.to)Attached: 1 image It randomly selected a New Zealand instance for me. The rules require that I explain how I am related to New Zealand. I am not in any way connected to New Zealand (I have seen Lord of the Rings, though).

@MikeBeas @neave This was fixed in a follow-up update!

@Mastodon @neave OK, this was my first sign up attempt in the follow-up version. I would not say this is a better experience for newcomers haha.

@MikeBeas @Mastodon @neave That's on us, that server should not be in the General category but it is. I can update that in our database.

@Gargron @Mastodon @neave fair enough, but it seems like a lot of servers are gonna get caught off guard by this.

i was given this server for Jewish folks, which i am not. worries me that people with anti-semitic views could be pushed onto such a server by default and create problems for the users and admins there. even if they wouldn’t seek out the server to join, it is now presented to them as the default here. a bit of an issue i think.

Eugen Rochko

@MikeBeas @Mastodon @neave I just moved this one to the Religion category. There might be some categorization issues on the data side, but in principle, this should work. Of course, nothing beats just directing people to mastodon.social by default.

@Gargron @Mastodon @neave hopefully the idea of federated social media catches on quickly and people come to grasp it so that this sort of thing will only be a short-term issue haha

@Gargron @MikeBeas maybe the UX should involve some helpers like, “This doesn’t seem like my cup of tea, try again”

Probably should have a tighter, more curated, selection of servers to randomly pick from, vs just a use-the-general-category situation. At least to start or until you can verify data cleanliness

@Gargron @MikeBeas @Mastodon @neave looks like this would benefit from using a hard-coded allow list until categorization is improved

@Gargron @MikeBeas @Mastodon @neave I think making mastodon.social/online is probably the easiest way to do this, considering user data would be processed through you guys and not a random general server!

@mtthw @Gargron @Mastodon @neave that is probably true but i think there could be scaling concerns if every new user was onboarded to one of those two by default.