Hundreds of apps around the world offer Social Web accounts. No matter which one you choose, your new account can still connect with people using any of the others.
Sign me up! The most important thing to me is…
This guide will get you started on a microblogging app, like Mastodon or something similar. If you’d prefer to find something for sharing video, photos, or something else, check out the other platforms guide.
Platform and app developers please note: this is a proof-of-concept example of decision support for a new user to find a service provider that makes sense for them, using a curated list of services. The data is freely available (message me for alternate formats) – if you can do a better job than this cobbled-together web flow, please take this as an open invitation. For example, you could review the Accept-Language header for a preferred language or locale, and shortcut some of these steps.
Notes on Classifying Fediverse Services
(the below is now a blog post, but I’m leaving this here for context in case people land here)
People join social networking services for many reasons. In descending order, the main motivations are socialisation especially with friends and family, prosocial behaviour like sharing helpful and informative content, escapism to manage mood and be entertained, and self-presentation – expressing oneself and sharing personal states and situations.
Some want to communicate with people near them, some want to communicate in a specific language or languages, some want to join a community of people who share an ethnic or cultural background that transcends language and region. Some (most) want to lurk, read news, enjoy memes, share content to their network, and look at photos of sheep. Some (1%) want as wide an audience as possible with a lot of global connections.
Not everyone, in fact not most people at all, want to be present at a global town square. Global town squares get a lot of press and money and fanfare, but the real work of connecting humans to other humans is a global exercise in some relatively boring stuff.
A poll of 550 Fediverse accounts found that 50% of new users would choose a service provider by topic, 37% by language or region, and 13% by a range of other decision points.
If you are creating any kind of guide to independent federated services – especially if you’re using nodeinfo data – please note the following:
Language does not equal region. Someone may be looking for a Spanish-language service in South America, not Spain. Welsh-learners worldwide may want to join a Welsh-language community. Chinese speakers live all around the world, but may want a Chinese-language service regardless of where it’s located.
Region does not equal language. People in a certain country may not speak the dominant local language, like an English-language service in Japan for expats. The region may be bi-lingual (Ireland, Canada, Paraguay…), tri-lingual (Belgium, Singapore, Switzerland…), or serve a range of bordering countries (Western Balkans, Africa). If you can read the Accept-Language header, use it, this is the end-user’s stated preferences.
Hosting country does not equal language or regional support. Many Asia and Oceania services are hosted in Australia, but are not Australian-focussed. 1,500 services hosted by Mastodon host extraordinaire masto.host will show up as French, but most are not intended for French audiences. Sites using Cloudflare may show up as being US-based, even though they are hosted in other countries.
Regional support does not mean it’s not a general purpose service. A Madagascar-based or Italian language service might still be a general purpose service for their audience. General purpose servers exist to support languages other than English.
Some Fediverse providers operating in languages and regions you don’t know are probably not the kind of places you want to send your app users to. Some of the largest Fediverse services and communities are happily hosting illegal content, armies of trolls, havens for hate speech. Consider using a denylist to filter out the domains and services you associate your service with. If you are publishing a data resource, consider gating the less-desirable data behind a second click-through or via a “full data access” mechanism, maybe with a content warning of some kind. Domains you link to or display can be viewed as a recommendation from you.
You should not trust nodeinfo data to be honest and accurate. GoToSocial servers have an optional “baffle” feature that reports spurious data (“Serve randomized, preposterous stats at instance and nodeinfo # endpoints”) to nodeinfo crawlers. NodeBB publishes nodeinfo whether it’s federated or not. Plenty of nodes report hilariously inaccurate data, for example this server reports 97 users with 97 billion posts… (it has neither)
Fun Fact: Four of the ten largest Mastodon instances (as measured by multiple Fediverse server lists) are also four of the most-blocked domains, one of which is a Russian news spam farm with spurious data in its nodeinfo file. If you’re using a third-party data service to decide what domains to show your users, review the third-parties’ inclusion and exclusion criteria.