So I'm seeing some discussion about why Mastodon isn't necessarily taking off with certain minorities (let's be honest, they mean POCs while trying to dance around the term, this place is super White asides from the apparent Japan contingent).
Here's some thoughts:
1. The whole notion of "instances" is really unintuitive. When you Google "Mastodon", you get an instance like mastodon.social, but it's not immediately apparent that M.S isn't your only option or WHY you'd want a different instance
2. Linked to #1 - there's no meta-Mastodon site that can explain the basics of what Mastodon is, give some suggestions for instances, and explain the whole instances thing.
3. Hell, I'd suggest changing the wording of some of these to make it sound less like you need to have been immersed in Open Source World to understand. "Instance" could be "community". "Federated" could be "across Mastodon". Etc etc. Relate it to terms that laypeople can understand.
@creatrixtiara didn't the main mastodon.social page (that you see if you log out) get rewritten to address both problems recently?
@creatrixtiara I don't know if the server overloading is out of the way or not but I do know the "other instances" stuff was mentioned when creating a new account was disabled, at least
I personally don't know enough about the problem to suggest anything specific, sorry
@andlabs looking at it now in incognito mode and eh...it still sounds very in-group-techy