I think you make a good point but I think it’s due to terminology. If you wanted an email address you wouldn’t go to joinemail.com and look at a list of email instances. It would be bewildering.
It’s worth remembering that most users don’t care how something works under the hood.
So I think Mastodon and Lemmy etc should look at how they onboard new users. So you could replace Instance with Community. Something like, “To join Mastodon you sign up with a community that has similar interests to you but you can still see and interact with other communities. Here’s a list of communities”
(I know Lemmy uses community to mean something more like a sub-Reddit)
There’s also some issues that need addressing around admins (trigger happy defederation, poor communication with other admins, not keeping the instance up to date, shutting down unexpectedly). Really there needs to be an a Council elected from Admins that can sort these things.
I think you make a good point but I think it’s due to terminology. If you wanted an email address you wouldn’t go to joinemail.com and look at a list of email instances. It would be bewildering.
It’s worth remembering that most users don’t care how something works under the hood.
So I think Mastodon and Lemmy etc should look at how they onboard new users. So you could replace Instance with Community. Something like, “To join Mastodon you sign up with a community that has similar interests to you but you can still see and interact with other communities. Here’s a list of communities”
(I know Lemmy uses community to mean something more like a sub-Reddit)
There’s also some issues that need addressing around admins (trigger happy defederation, poor communication with other admins, not keeping the instance up to date, shutting down unexpectedly). Really there needs to be an a Council elected from Admins that can sort these things.