Mastodon has seen a renewed interest these last few days, but when you look at the statistics mastodon.social siphons the biggest part of the pie, it sees a few thousands new sign-ups a day, while medium sized instance and smaller ones only get a few, sometimes just single digits increase.
This has been exacerbated since mastodon changed its UI both on web and mobile apps, to make the flagship instance the default one for sign-up in an effort to lower the entry barrier, which on the same time is leading to unhealthy concentration, on a platform that advocates for decentralization through federation.
Do you think this is the way forward on the fediverse ?
#mastodon #pixelfed #lemmy #fediverse
It is difficult because many new users come from centralized experiences and for them it is more natural to simply enter the first instance they find, which will always be Mastodon.social. They may also think that being on smaller instances means less visibility (which I believe is not the case, although I am open to be corrected on this).
I think the ideal would be a kind of recommendation system based on tastes and interests. When you go to the Mastodon site to register, it asks you your main interests and based on those it recommends one or another instance.