this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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I think beginners would find it a lot easier if "it's like email" was closer to the start. But as it is you have to dig a bit before you get that particular bit of insight.
Where do you sign up? Wherever suits you. Posteo, Mailbox, Tuta etc; there are plenty of others. You aren't limited to emailing those on your server, you can email anyone anywhere. You don't need an account on all email servers to email people on those servers. It's the same with Lemmy. You're on beehaw.org, I'm on lemm.ee, and the next post down (on my screen) is on lemmy.ca.
What if you're on Posteo but all your friends are on Mailbox? Well you can switch to Mailbox if you want but it's not necessary. You can still email each other.
Defederation: if for example everyone on scammersunited.com is a scammer, the admins of your email server might decide to block email from that instance by default. Federation's just a fancy word for people on Tuta to be able to email people on Runbox.
It'd be interesting if everyone "started" in the same place. For example, Mastodon.social. But then eventually, like maybe after 90 days, one was forced to choose a "home" instance to migrate to. Could be through a list of servers presented, or maybe a user has found one through friends, so they just type in the server and it kicks off a migration process. I'm almost thinking like an MMO starting area.
During that 90 days, the user has to (or should) learn about federation, why decentralization is important for privacy and security, what defederation means and blocking options, how and why instances are a thing, how to migrate an account, etc. Maybe even some info on how and why one could stand up their own instance.
And this doesn't have to like a classroom/book setting. It doesn't have to be "read this documentation." Maybe some 1min video clips, brief tooltips, little reminders to read a brief paragraph of two on some Mastodon topic. Gamify it; let people collect badges and achievements.
During all this, users have full access to everything Mastodon users can do. They can interact with anyone on the entry server, plus any server that's federated with it. Or maybe they're an already experienced user and want to go straight to another instance; they can either skip all this and migrate or start straight at another instance.
Though I wonder if that's still too much friction.