I've been thinking more about the hurtle of getting friends and family to use federated/self-hosted services. One of the issues to onboarding is people not understanding the idea of picking an instance. This has led, in part, to "default" instances, like lemmy.world, that could grow so large it would almost defeat the idea.

I've been thinking that I really wish DeltaChat had a web client. I have had a MUCH more difficult time getting folks to try that out than even federated SNS. But I was thinking how the heck are you going to pull that off without delta@chaos.social having to host the overhead for a robust web client and possibly host a gigantic server system that has to grow exponentially to keep everyone's private encrypted chats from all the possible email providers, really defeating the goal of their project.

This morning, I thought of a possible solution to both problems. What if you have a built-in transfer requirement. So you start with a default, say pleb.joinmastodon.org or noob.delta.chat and after a certain time (3 months or something) you have to either transfer to a new instance, including hosting your own client for in browser decryption web access to your encrypted mail chats, or your account (in the case of #mastodon) or web client access (in the case of Delta Chat) is shut off.

Do you think this could work?

@fediverse

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[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I don't think so. When talking about scale, I think it's more realistic to think that most of people won't understand nor care enough to understand what instances are. Even after they become regular users

[–] fuat2mb@theres.life 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@INeedMana I don't see many folks not understanding email they can pick yahoo.com or mail.ru and still send and receive mail with everyone they know. And most of us "on-boarded" to a "default" at one time, whether it was your OG ISP or gmail.com when you got your first Android, or icloud.com(?) when you got your original iPhone.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 2 points 3 days ago

I'm not convinced that many people really understand the difference between mail@gmail vs mail@yahoo and that technically speaking everyone could be hosting their own mail server. "It's just the address to find you" does not imply understanding what's a domain

[–] fuat2mb@theres.life 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@INeedMana which is why I'm saying "force" them to.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 1 points 3 days ago

I get your point. But with such approach I expect messages somewhere else like "I set up an account on fedi, it was really great but after a few months they just deleted my account for no reason. There were some banners about changing instance, whatever that means, but that was for the admins, right?"