So I'm seeing some discussion about why Mastodon isn't necessarily taking off with certain minorities (let's be honest, they mean POCs while trying to dance around the term, this place is super White asides from the apparent Japan contingent).
Here's some thoughts:
1. The whole notion of "instances" is really unintuitive. When you Google "Mastodon", you get an instance like mastodon.social, but it's not immediately apparent that M.S isn't your only option or WHY you'd want a different instance
2. Linked to #1 - there's no meta-Mastodon site that can explain the basics of what Mastodon is, give some suggestions for instances, and explain the whole instances thing.
3. Hell, I'd suggest changing the wording of some of these to make it sound less like you need to have been immersed in Open Source World to understand. "Instance" could be "community". "Federated" could be "across Mastodon". Etc etc. Relate it to terms that laypeople can understand.
4. URGH OMG I've lost what I've written 3-4 times now because I clicked on Extended Information and instead of loading in that 4th sidebar it changed the page, then I pressed Back and my writing is gone, then I wanted to reply to someone and it overwrote this sidebar...etc etc anyway side annoyance
4. "Extended information" hides what should be front and center - the COC and the moderators. I wasn't presented any of this information when I signed up for this instance. Why not? Make it prominent
5. I'm still not confident that anything can be done if someone's impersonating me on another instance. I'm told that I had to rely on people I know to tell the difference, but what if not many people I know are on Mastodon yet? Or they get taken in by the other person?
6. Similarly, I don't see any clear way for me to report harassment. I see links to report *codebase issues* (which involves GitHub which is its own headache for non-techies) but I don't really know what my recourse is otherwise
@creatrixtiara Alas, anti-impersonation/authentication is somewhat antithetical to federated services (“single truth” implies centralized). There could be some kind of central registry where people check if someone is you. Such a service could be automatically consulted by Mastodon (to display checkmarks or similar in profiles). But, at most, you could prove your identity to the service via another account or a domain.
