https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/

I thought the whole point of Mastodon is to be a federated social network where the first choice is to choose their instance, so why has Mastodon's app chosen mastodon.social as the default instance to centralise new users on one server instead of encouraging federation?

Did Mastodon recognise that BlueSky and others are gaining rapid traction due to Mastodon being extremely hard to onboard new users? BlueSky may have an invite system now, but even then, I can't imagine the massive adoption it would get when the invite system gets lifted.

Mastodon's new change was probably too late and may have severely dented it's aims to become mainstream and friendly towards non-technical folks. It looks like they swayed against its federated principles and now has taken the route to select a default instance for users to make mastodon.social even more centralised and less federated.