With the new instance picker live on instances.mastodon.xyz we are helping @thekinrar by creating a feedback thread for it here.
The picker is the second step to help new users find a home that suits them in the Mastoverse. (The first step is joinmastodon.org, which also directs them to instances.mastodon.xyz)
To have a look, at the instance picker, and the flow you can follow the link below.
When we reach the list (after having made all our choices), I feel like it could benefit from shifting with two colours between each line (instance possibility), not only when we hover over it.
And some white space ontop of the block may make it feel little less cramped.
I really like the wizard, but I wish it didnât come with a worse instances list. It was really useful for me to quickly gauge the changes in the activity and popularity of different parts of the fediverse, and it was really easy to measure things like statuses per user and things like that.
I misunderstood the moderation rules selection page the first time â I thought âAuthorizedâ meant âthis kind of content is allowedâ while âDeniedâ meant âthis kind of content is not allowedâ. Can the wording be made clearer? For example âShould there be a moderation rule against this type of content? Yes / No matter / Noâ
Oh hm thatâs weird. I thought I checked âdeniedâ for a bunch of the first entries and then somehow got a list of pornography instances, but I guess it was just my mistake. Sorry.
I would still suggest fiddling with the wording a little bit â it took a while to parse âauthorizedâ and âdeniedâ as it seemed briefly that it could also mean âmoderators have / donât have the authority to moderate this kind of contentâ. Perhaps âallowedâ and âbannedâ might be clearer?
It took me quite a while to find out where / how to give feedback on instances.mastodon.xyz (eg, to find that github url). This concerns me, given that the site is essentially core Mastodon infrastructure now. So I have two opinions
instances.mastodon.xyz should include a link to the github repo in the nav
We want to be able to decentralize, and allow people to work on their own volition. In a lot of cases having it as their own project is worth while.
One of the reasons why joinmastodon.org is currently pointing at instances.mastodon.xyz is because we (other people than thekinrar) have not been able to make a instance picker go live on our own.
If we find that instances.mastodon.xyz does not fill the needs we (mastodon project/joinmastodon) want filled, we can fork, as we have been allowed to reuse the code.
But right now, it is very good that itâs someone elseâs project. Mainly because we wouldnât want to be a bottleneck with development, more than we already are.
Yes, the ability to sort instances was better before⌠an instance with a too low connection count is usually very silent. Instances with a good connection count should be premiered as it might lead to more people staying. We donât want people to join and then leave with the feeling that Mastodon is dead. It is bad marketing.
This is a super cool tool, and Iâm sure would be helpful to new people, thanks for putting it together @thekinrar!
I wonder what it would take to add some sort of âtaggingâ to instances so that you could actually search by interests as well? Is that already talked about?
FWIW, I think that the tagging about what instances allow what things may not actually be up-to-date, or default to âallowedâ in cases that (unfortunately) misrepresent some instances.
awoo.space, frex, came up when I searched for instances that allow hate speech, yet (from awooâs own about/more):
The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline, and may result in account suspension and revocation of access to the service:
Racism or advocation of racism
Sexism or advocation of sexism
Discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof
Xenophobic and/or violent nationalism
Ableism or advocation of ableism, as described above
Arguing with a moderator or admin in bad faith, especially as a new member to the community
and
The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will result in revocation of access to the service:
Sexual depictions of children
Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism
Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism
(I believe I saw other examples but didnât look into those further, just this one for the moment.)
Is the instance pickerâs filtering generally functional now?
I suspect itâs broken. When you choose Hebrew as your language you donât get relevant results (basically just tooot.im), for example.
In the âModeration rulesâ part, what is the point of making possible to choose instances that allow âsexism, racism, links to illegal content, spam, hate speeches, harassmentâ?
I mean, I think it make sense to provide a tool that makes easier the search of instances that forbid these things, but providing a tool for instances that promotes harassment or sexism seems weird to me.
Why is this great instance picker wizard not on joinmastodon.org anymore? Now there is only a long list of instances, without any useful information for new people.
