I had shared an earlier version of this last week, and a draft of the updates a few days ago. Thanks to everybody for the feedback!
Here’s the key points:
- Don’t tell people “it’s easy”
- Improve the “getting-started experience”
- Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
- Prioritize accessibility
- Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
- Invest in moderation tools
- Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
- Values matter
- This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity
This. I’m a pretty sech-savvy person but I have procrastinated making accounts on any decentralized platform for years for this exact reason. I understand the federation but it seemed like a hassle to have to choose an instance (even if I know it does not matter). I was paralized by the fact I had to commit to one, and having to decide which one that would be.
Just link people to kbin.social and don’t bother them with other instances unless they want to. They will find that out on their own eventually and either care or not.
At first I thought just like you that I can pick any and it won’t matter. But then I found that some instances defederate others and some ppl won’t even see what you type. Just like shadow banning, but for a whole instance. I don’t understand why thry do that, it will hurt the communities a lot.
Also, the threat of your instance shutting down and having to migrate to another instance. These are just things most people never had to consider in the past so it seems quite abnormal and “risky”.
Most of the time it won’t matter. Only a few instances defederated and it won’t impact most users. They mostly did it temporarily because they couldn’t handle the massive number of users who came from reddit.