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.
@creatrixtiara Federated is been long before mastadon, it is thing I believe immerse from gnu/Linux which is kinda like mastodon as they share the same techniques behind
@teozard and therein lies the problem - the word "federated" comes from a VERY techie thing. Non-techies aren't gonna know this history or context. They'll probably think "federated as in countries???"
@creatrixtiara this is actually very true, federated is like countries your server connected to so you can interact with people from other "country"
@creatrixtiara here is the article to make clear what's the federated timeline is, how things work, about some technical stuff and a little bit of history. https://robek.world/featured/what-is-gnu-social-and-is-mastodon-social-a-twitter-clone/
@teozard this is raising some questions for me about the nature of federation as far as tech is concerned