Daniel Supernault
Pixelfed is bringing hundreds of thousands of users to the fediverse who don't know about federation.
I'm now overhauling our onboarding in the app so new users can login and join without the complexity of federation.
If you want to login to another server, you'll have to go into the options menu and select "Login to custom server".
Say what you will about centralization, the people are looking for a stable and ethical home for photo sharing, and I have 7 years of experience providing one.
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meejah
@dansup Yeah, I think I agree here (that is, if I understand your point).
The ideal situation would be that "switching instances" was easy enough to not even bother with the whole "how to choose an instance" part up front -- later, you can learn about it and decide where to land, because switching is easy enough to just do it.
rockpick
@dansup no problem with that. Imho, whoever provides a useful app should "have dibs" on offering their instance as a default.
Andrew Melder
@dansup I know there's probably many who will disagree but I also think this is the right call.
Unlike Mastodon, which I feel left it way too late to move this way and now has the perception of complexity; I hope this leads to wider adoption of Pixelfed.
https://andrewmelder.com/2025/01/16/how-the-pick-your-server.html
Tim Chambers
@dansup - I have zero problem with this and think onboarding needs to be as easy here as it is on centralized platforms.
For the future: you might consider still only showing users ONE server to join, but in then randomly rotate in which one it shows -- from a pool of say 4 or 5 servers you do deals with & know are well run, scalable & solid social homes. That way you get the best of both worlds --> a seemless onboarding, PLUS a spreading out of users across multiple servers.
Tim Chambers
@julian @dansup I'd say a good UX, can make it clear which server you are on in the sign up process without being confusing. This would apply too if you had one of four being chosen for users by default.
Julian Fietkau
@tchambers @dansup One issue with that approach is sooner or later (when they want to log in on another device, when they get a new phone, etc.) people will need to know what server they're on. Flagship instances circumvent this by saying "if you don't know, you're almost certainly on this one." It can't be randomly assigned and then never brought up again. If people get assigned to random servers, we need to find reliable ways to make them feel connected to their server and remember it later.
Clot
@dansup I think a better solution could be making a list of servers which have approximately same rules and choose random one of them and do load balancing.
Ofcourse you would need to consult with the server admins if they are willing to do it..
snahn ip
@dansup this is not the way sir
Paul Sutton
Great stuff :) Keep up the excellent work.
snahn ip
Superego needs to humble itself.
Sexybiggetje🐖
@lpwaterhouse I completely agree. If you don't educate the user, it will never change and you're actually hurting decentralisation by proxy @dansup
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse
@dansup Frankly, I think you should go in the opposite direction. Pixelfed is already making the process of discovering federation and, say following a Mastodon account, or vice-versa, pretty hard. It always feels like an island to me, not part of the wider fediverse. You should lean into *that*, it's what makes the Fediverse *resilient* instead of being yet another clone of a proprietary service...
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