@feditips I totally agree. This seems super dangerous to me as well. I think it's an example of why no one person should control the lion's share of Fediverse software.

I SUSPECT that Eugen & Co are doing this from good intentions. The SINGLE biggest hurdle to Fediverse adoption, or at least what we hear the most kvetching about, is the fact that you have to decide which instance to join.

This is ludicrous for those of us who've 'lived here' a while, but in a world where people are used to being force fed by the Algorithm, choice is a burden rather than a boon.

I honestly don't know how to fix that.

From a concrete perspective, what should we do? Eugen owns Mastodon. It's an open source project, so if they go forward with this people are free to fork.

Or even better, perhaps this is an opportunity to signal boost other instance software that doesn't funnel everyone into mastodon.social?