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@maegul @fediversenews @hosting I do like this idea. It's kinda silly, but selecting a server is a big source of friction for some.

But how do you pick the default(s)? This sort of decision can have a huge influence on the evolution of the network. There's also a big range of experiences on the Fediverse, so helping folks find a good fit matters.

Maybe a quick survey? Like, which of these hash tags do you want more / less of?

@ngaylinn @fediversenews @hosting yea, in principle, tackling that friction for newcomers makes a lot of sense.

But realistically, the whole instance thing is fraught from a UX perspective IMO. They can be simultaneously meaningless and important. In some ways, federated instances are a nice-to-have safety structure where most of the time you don’t want to and indeed don’t have any need to care too much about it.

@ngaylinn @fediversenews @hosting so imposing this choice from the beginning really is unnecessary. But, getting everyone onto the top 3 servers (as #gargron acknowledges) kinda defeats the point of the federated safety feature.

So there are questions about how to have the best of both worlds.

@maegul @fediversenews @hosting Interesting. I do like the idea of being able to follow people and see what sort of content comes from different instances before you commit to a server. To do that well, though, you'd need seamless automatic migrations. I also worry managing the culture in that pool could be difficult. It might be easy to poison.

I kinda like the idea of spreading people around semi-randomly, biased by interests / preferences. That does bring up its own challenges, though, like people not getting local instance rules and expectations. Some are definitely not for general audiences. You'd need ways of curating instance lists for the whole Fediverse, which would quickly get political...

@ngaylinn @fediversenews @hosting I’ve migrated once and found it worked quite well. I can seem room for improvement in how easy it is to the point of it being a button followed by an authentication to confirm, but getting people used to it is also probably necessary.

An issue with it though unlikely to go away is that your posts are not transferred and can only be retrieved through the cache on your old instance. Hard to stomach for many I think.