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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[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 1 points 3 days ago

@fuat2mb@theres.life Personally, I like the idea of instances exclusive for testing out.

Also Mastodon allows the user to point to his/her new account, so migrating, for outsiders, doesn't too far fetched to implement elsewhere if desired. And Mastodon and Lemmy (at least) allow exporting the user's data, so also not reinventing the wheel there. And the idea of an instance made for testing out could be set up just like that, on an instance basis, so no need to change fundamental functionalities of a given forum engine.

Two things I'd propose, though, first to not allow new magazines/communities to be created by non-admin/moderators as to not have derelict ones once the allowed usage period ends, and to have some level of control on people subscribing to avoid bots.

And regarding the usage period, I wonder if a moderator bot could be set up to automatically lock a given account after it, only allowing to log in to get the aforementioned export data (if that is to be implemented).