IME, none of that actually matters at a practical level.
I think the biggest mistake Eugen had made is simply listing the number of users on an instance. Users will almost always pick the instance with the highest user count, which is counter productive in all sorts of ways.
Instead, we should push users to find an instance that matches their interests, and then show them the federated timeline. That's really all you need to take a user from Twitter and get them comfortable on mastodon.
But then again, Eugen dropped the federated timeline from the official apps because mastodon.social got too big to handle it, and now new users are more confused and mastodon.social is a worse experience than ever.
My general recommendation to everyone is to find a smaller instance that sounds interesting, wade through the local timeline to be sure you like the vibes, follow some people, then dive into the federated feed
I think the biggest mistake Eugen had made is simply listing the number of users on an instance. Users will almost always pick the instance with the highest user count, which is counter productive in all sorts of ways.
Instead, we should push users to find an instance that matches their interests, and then show them the federated timeline. That's really all you need to take a user from Twitter and get them comfortable on mastodon.
But then again, Eugen dropped the federated timeline from the official apps because mastodon.social got too big to handle it, and now new users are more confused and mastodon.social is a worse experience than ever.
My general recommendation to everyone is to find a smaller instance that sounds interesting, wade through the local timeline to be sure you like the vibes, follow some people, then dive into the federated feed