It's actually a messaging failure, because picking "the wrong instance" is practically impossible. It really doesn't matter what instance you're in, since that's not what limits or expands your available content.

[–] ptu@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Mastodon servers can have different character limits and other customizations, but migrating is supposedly easy so you got that quite right. In Lemmy though there is a ”local” feature where you can easily browse content in your own server. I never use it but I guess it could be useful for some communities.

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

There's a "local" feed on Mastodon, too, but it's not very well signposted.

[–] forestbeasts@pawb.social 1 points 9 hours ago

Gargron (the Masto lead dev)'s been trying to kill it because he doesn't want us to have nice things.

-- Frost

[–] monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I am just saying some of the things I have heard. People don’t want the cognitive overhead of having to make decisions before trying a thing. They just wanna sign up and look around get a feel for something before deciding to dive in.

Mastodon in particular has a steep onboarding process. In order to get it useful you have too

Sign up for an instance (which they have to find)
search for people to follow when people are thinking in topics.

There isn’t an easy way to stumble into new things. I found it tedious and others I have spoken with have said the same. I suppose Mastodon isn’t for me (hence why I am here).

[–] desertdruid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think there is a misunderstanding on what a starter pack means here because it literally tries to help with this point:

search for people to follow when people are thinking in topics.

There is no way to pick a wrong starter pack because you can pick whatever you want, one pack, two packs, cero packs.

It's just a list of accounts that you can follow in bulk

edit: well looks like you won't be able to have a 'follow all' button on mastodon but its the same idea

[–] fenrasulfr@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Aren't most instances connected and can't you search all those instances for accounts you'd want to follow?

[–] monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don’t already know who I want to follow though. What do I search for?

BTW these are things I have actually discussed with people when they are trying to look into fediverse stuff. They don’t want to know how it works. They just want to open up their devices and turn their brains off.

Which is probably a good thing for federated services as it filters out a bunch of people we probably don’t want here. It’s like a test to join.

[–] fenrasulfr@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

In the search tab in the mastodon app you can just look for # or names of things you find interesting.