Content warning: I finally understand how Mastodon is dificult.
I'm *finally* starting to understand what people mean when they say picking a server is difficult. Unfortunately, you won't find these explanations in blogs and otherwise because people can't articulate the below. Why? I dunno, but after years of hearing the below, it *finally* clicked after someone *finally* explained it to me instead of saying fuck you all nerds!
Firstly, there isn't enough info about servers on the Join Mastodon pages. It gives barely any information and doesn't give a preview of the server, just a small and tiny space to learn about a server and even then that is incomplete. For example, how many polls can we have? How many poll questions can we have? What's the character limit? Can I preview the local timeline before joining? Not unless you're using an app like Mona or something. If you can do this on desktop, how do you do it?
If Join Mastodon isn't providing the information you need, how do you find out where to go to get better server information since Join Mastodon doesn't link to other directories.
You *can* get a lot of info about a server but you'd have to know to use a URL like https://<instance>/api/v1/instance and that's nowhere on Join Mastodon, at all.
Secondly, if a person decides to shut down their server, exports aren't emailed to users. A user would need to know when a server was shutting down and then they have to back it up. How can you move all your followers if you wake up one morning and your server is just shut down?
Since servers are shutting down, how do I know what server to pick before it shuts down? How will I know it's shutting down and where do I go to find this information logged out?
Third, how do you know how well your moderators act on requests? Where do you get this information? If so, how do you get it while logged out?
There are more, but that's just only some of the problems that haven't been addressed yet, if even at all that was **finally** explained to me, after years of telling us it's hard without explaining *how* it's hard!
Tobias likes this.