Hey... that just gave me a small idea... what if we made a "flock" or "herd" of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.

When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?

[–] clot27@lemm.ee 1 points 2 hours ago

Basically, a single instance

[–] gregor@gregtech.eu 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn't get overloaded?

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

You'd have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname

[–] gregor@gregtech.eu 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

This is quite unnecessary, it would be simpler if we have a list of the long-running and most stable instances and have the users pick one.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 1 points 36 minutes ago* (last edited 36 minutes ago)

That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.

[–] Kbobabob@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

When you make an account

Where?

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 10 hours ago

Let me see how you get instance admins to agree on what to defederate.

[–] JaymesRS@literature.cafe 23 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Honestly that’s probably the best sort of solution. A group that has some minimum standards of moderation and maintenance/upgrade management plan and just evenly distribute the load as people arrive.

Then as a second phase make it easy to transfer, that way at the point the user gets comfortable they can easily swap to a better* “home” for those that care, for those that don’t, make the server choice be virtually invisible.

[–] R3D4CT3D@midwest.social 5 points 16 hours ago

i like the idea of a server choice virtually invisible feature!