@evan Yes, but only if it covers the entire Fediverse and is not limited to Mastodon, as is unfortunately too often the case, excluding all other services.

@evan

Something other than this?

ALT

@evan I’d be selective about follows, but would love to encourage people to get over here!

@evan I'd prefer and option to NOT be automatically followed

@evan Only friends, not family 😬

@evan Sounds neat! It is kind of hard to find people even when you know what you're doing.

@evan guessing this is built in: If I were to start a new instance where I invited people to join, an autofollow both ways on that would be sweet :)
fyi @shlee how might that work?

@evan But to clearly give the explanation I guess or some way that people do not feel their emails are being tracked. I think of the many times I got the stupid Linkdin emails that I never followed but was annoyed by.

@evan yes, I lost contact with a lot of my Sacramento friends in one the big waves bailing from Twitter because even though they found an open instance and signed up, they had a hard time with following remote accounts and general discovery things.

@evan I'd be more into the idea of an easy way for them to follow everyone that I'm following

@rhelune your choice obviously.

@lakelady why would you send the invitation, then?

@evan to encourage them to explore the fediverse

@lakelady ok, but couldn't you just send them https://joinmastodon.org/ or https://fediverse.party/ or something?

@wendinoakland I don't understand what "selective" here means. These are invitations you're sending to someone you know and want to be connected to.

@evan Oh, I think the family element tripped me up… that’s complicated.

@evan @wendinoakland I think many people's experience with software that asks you to "invite your friends and family!" mostly just want access to your address book to spam people. I like the idea of being able to customize and invite that would help onboard someone or someones, but it's hard to push past past (bad) experiences.

@smattymatty probably close to that but not requiring that they join your same instance (or even the same platform)

@evan

Gotcha, yeah that would be cool, and in-line with my belief of 'many small servers > few big servers'

Would be even cooler if it let you implement follow lists as well, so it doesn't just follow YOU, but a few other accounts you pre-select for them ;)

@crossgolf_rebel I don't think there's anything to do this for just Mastodon, either.

@evan Oh, there are a whole range of tools that are built specifically for Mastodon and are unusable for all other services.
Especially in German-speaking countries.

@crossgolf_rebel Something that builds an URL that you can send to your mom, and when she visits that URL, it will set up an account for her, and also have that new account follow you? I have not seen it. I would also be surprised if that was the case, since so many services clone the Mastodon API.