As I finish the new @pixelfed app onboarding screens, there are a few places where I want to make it easy for users to contact instance admins via email.

This would require all @pixelfed instances to set this field in the admin dashboard so its available via the instance endpoint, but would only work if they all did this.

Maybe I could make this a requirement (for our app), and verify it periodically by sending an email to the address and unlisting servers that don't comply.

Thoughts?

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Simon Lucy

@dansup @pixelfed

It's not really much different to having a postmaster email address.

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Aaron🏳️‍🌈

@dansup @pixelfed Sounds good to me. Responsible Admins will provide an E-Mail anyway.

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metapixl.com

@dansup @pixelfed Good thing for more trust and additionally it could create awareness that pixelfed is not only a single server. but also on admin side it could provide more responsibility for the users on the instance.
This should be opt in for completely anonymous instances, which should not be listed in the official app then.

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Alex Qwxlea

@dansup @pixelfed There will always be people who want to opt-out because of reasons. That should be possible, it would be a bit irresponsible to have a public service without a way to contact the admin, but that is their responsibility. Forcing people to do the right thing hardly ever works well.
Pixelfed is slowly turning into a meta-service, kudos!

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fuzzyface

@dansup @pixelfed General agreement. Running a server, whilst done voluntarily, still has its responsibilities. We should have as many 'good' servers as possible, but few good ones is better than many bad ones. Maybe more can be done to support admins and thus to encourage this? No idea how this is best done though. Sorry.

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James J Malcolm

@dansup @pixelfed why email when the app itself is literally a communication platform?

As in, why not an emergency account (with captya etc) which would DM the admin on Pixelfed or Mastodon & email back the response?

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jstm@sos:~$ :blinking_cursor:

@dansup @pixelfed On paper it's a great idea, but maybe they (for some unknown reason) don't want to share an e-mail address they should not be forced to do so. It's like "hey do this or get effed up" which is not great.

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YHSI 🦇

@dansup @pixelfed I think making an email address mandatory (and verifying it, maybe with a magic link now and then) to be listed in an onboarding dialog is okay. But if you (as server admin) care for a more private space you can simply skip this at the cost of not being listed during onboarding with your instance. Since every responsible service provider should share a way to be contacted (my personal opinion) there would be no harm in making this way visible.

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Dallas Groot

@pixelfed @dansup what about self hosted instances where there isn’t sign up?

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