I’m just spitballing here, top of my head ideas, so not in anyway thought out finished concepts. Now with that being said, what if the fediverse handled the situation like this…

You, someone who’s never heard of the fediverse goes to “Lemmy.com” and this website is not an instance. It’s just a place to learn how the fediverse works, and gives you suggestions based on your input on where you might be happiest.

Maybe it has a spotlight on popular instances. Or a trending instances showcase. Whatever the case, you enter maybe 10 interests you have, gender, political leanings, ect. And it gives you a list of what it thinks you might like.

You can totally ignore it’s suggestions, and join WHATEVER instance. The issue I had as a new user, is that I didn’t know SHIT about Lemmy when I joined. I joined Lemmy.World because it seemed to be the most popular one. It’s what google recomended.

I know you can export your settings. But step 1 in my opinion is being able to LITERALLY move your whole account. Post history, comments, up/downvotes, settings, preferences, subscribed communities. EVERYTHING.

So if I want to hop to another community, all I gotta do is go into settings, click the “change host instance” button, enter in my new instance, confirm I DO actually want to move everything, and then poof, now I’m somewhere else with no consequence to myself.

Now, since I said EVERYTHING moves with you, it also means this isn’t a way to get around community bans. If a community banned you a year ago, you can’t just switch instances and not be banned. You’re still banned.

And anyone that YOU banned will remain in your banned list.

So that brings us to defederation. Right now, defederation is just permanent for the whole group. Two instances don’t get along? Well now both communities userbases suffer for it. So what I suggest is that we reinvent the idea of what defederating is. Let’s say two communities don’t get along, and so the mods decide to defederate. Now you, as the user will get a message. “Such and Such instance that you’re hosted on has decided to defederate from Such and Such Other instance. Do you agree?” If you say yes, then you have joined the defederation. You personally are defederated. If you say no, you remain federated with them. And any defederation the community has already done will be the default settings for that community. If for any reason you wish to re-federate at a later date, or upon signup, all you do is flip the switch back on for that comminity. Now you alone are re-federated with that community, but the default community stance is defederated.

And I know you can individually block the communitys and instances already, but this is more like giving the individual communities a personality. These are the values this community stands for. There may be individuals here who disagree with our stance, but this is generally the vibe we’re looking to achieve here.

They could even have a link on every sidebar of defederated communities, along with a message from the mods under each one as long or as short as the mods want to write, that explains what happened so you can decide if their values line up with yours, or if you care. They could also show you numbers of who’s following the defederation, or NOT following the defederation. So you get an idea of if that defederation actually is something that represents the people.

You could even hold votes inside the community. “Should we defederate from so and so?” and act accordingly upon the election end.

Because I’ve been pounding this point since I got here, that if you want to grow the userbase, you need to understand something very simple. Users are PEOPLE. People want easy. If blonde valley girl bimbo britney needs to think about something, it’s too hard for her.

But at the same time, I TOTALLY get what you’re going for with the decentralized approach to social media. So, for those who care about that, I think this method gives them control. Gives them access to tools to manage their own feeds. For those who just want to browse cat pictures and upvote them, and say “Awwww, cute kitty”, they are already protected from what their instance considers to be harmful people. They don’t have to think about hexbear, or lemmy.ml, or whatever that other instance that’s shutting down.

But I’m not a code writer. I’m sure all the techies are going to give me 101 reasons why I’m wrong, why my opinions don’t matter, and how stupid I am. Because that’s just what the internet is these days.