• In a bid to attract new users, Mastodon has announced a simplified onboarding process that will sign people onto a default server.
• The platform has also improved its infrastructure to cope with a growing community of users.
• It adds that a decentralised experience is still core to its DNA.

Remember Mastodon? When Elon Musk took over Twitter, many people went in search of a new social media platform, with some heading to the decentralised network.

Anyone who has tried to sign up with the platform will know how confusing it can be, which is why is has announced a simpler onboarding process for new users.

Much of the confusion when signing up resulted from the sheer volume of servers, or instances as Mastodon calls them, available to users, with the number sitting somewhere close to 12k-plus at the time of writing. Now new users will be signed up to the platform via a default server.

“Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge,” explained CEO Eugen Rochko in a blog post.

“To make this step easier, we now have a default sign-up option that works with a server we operate. If you wish to leave or join a different server, you can do so at any time,” he added.

The CEO has also addressed how this process impacts the company’s decentralised nature.

“You may be asking, how a default server option furthers decentralization. We believe it’s important for Mastodon to be good as a product on its own merits, and not just because of its ideology. If we only attract people who already care about decentralization, our ability to make decentralization mainstream becomes that much harder,” he explained.

Whether this simpler process does indeed attract more users to Mastdon remains to be seen, but it’s clear the platform is acutely aware that its experience needs to be as frictionless as possible, which is not something that Twitter can say of late.

“We’re also continuously working on improving content and profile discovery, onboarding, and of course our extensive set of moderation tools, as well as removing friction from decentralized features. Keep a lookout for these updates soon,” Rochko concluded.