After all the drama revealed on Mastodon by this weekend's shitstorms this feels so damn real now...
Context?
Meta made a secret meeting with signed NDAs with the admins of multiple Matodon instances in preparation for their upcoming Twitter alternative. This of course wasn't taken lightly by people and has caused divisions. This is what i think the best summary of some of the inter-instance drama that happened, maybe the best summary of events in general ever made on the history of the Fediverse
This is the issue.
How are new users meant to know what instances federate with which other instances and which are blocked? E.g. that Beehaw defederated with the Lemmy.world instances?
What (most) users want is to be able to see a sane set of defaults and from there make their own choices about what they do and don’t want to see. But by the time they’ve made an account. Subbed to a few communities etc there is a wall to leaving for another instance if you don’t like the way something is being run given there is no easy way to migrate your profile to another instance that may suit you better.
Now don’t get me wrong, online harassment sucks to put it lightly. Nobody should have to put up with it and it’s entirely (to reuse my previous example) beehaw’s right to block harassment causing instances, but that doesn’t make it any easier for new people trying to get into the lemmy ecosystem.
I don't think it'll really matter in most cases once there's enough people/content. Most people didn't care about forums outside of Reddit's sphere of influence either.
Most people will probably just make a new community on their instance of choice if an instance is blocked and they don't want to make a new account.
I may be wrong but I think I did hear that mastodon has profile transfer, and that is something that other fediverses should be able to do, just there's a lot going on at the moment.
That does not include posts because of the network-wide difficulties in syncing.
