Hey new people and those thinking of joining, you do NOT need to sign up on huge servers!
You can follow and interact with people on any server from any server, the servers are connected.
It would really, really help the network right now if you could sign up on medium or small size servers. You will still be able to follow and interact with whoever you want, and the network as a whole will work much better.
A good safe place for beginners to find servers to join is https://joinmastodon.org/servers
@feditips
From an expectations perspective, this is a *really* hard sell.
1) "But I want to be where my friends are" doesn't respond to logic. It's a reaction that is literally bred into us as a species.
2) Bootstrapping your timelines is an inscrutable process when you're not on larger servers. Websites with giant directories of people are intimidating, and small servers with fewer total follows from the server to populate the federated timeline don't provide enough varied content.
"But I want to be where my friends are" doesn't respond to logic. It's a reaction that is literally bred into us as a species."
I don't think this is true on federated networks.
Do people join a phone provider because their friends are on it?
No, because it makes no difference, because phone networks are federated. You can call people even if you're on different providers.
Your friends aren't "on" another server, you're all on the Fediverse and can interact and follow each other.
@feditips
You're talking about an entrenched system that was inherited from physical landline service, vs a completely new federated system built on entirely different principles.
If I said "hey you should get a cellphone. I'm on Verizon." And you went to Verizon to be like "hey my buddy said I should sign up" and they're like "sorry, not taking any more customers, you should go find a list of other carriers to try, there's several dozen of them" that would be friction.
1/2
@feditips
I'm not saying the fediverse doesn't work as you describe. I'm saying we will be fighting an uphill battle to negate those human impulses and keep people engaged. It's a problem we need to face and not just hand -wave away as irrelevant