I mean, people do this for email. I want email, I heard Gmail is good, so I go to Gmail’s site.
The mere existence of a protocol isn’t the issue here. I think the problem is more that the protocol doesn’t have champions like your ISP/Microsoft/Google. Mastodon saying “come here then go somewhere else” isn’t good; it’d be better if there was a default option somehow.
It’s a common problem with open source; I worked on Passit and we had to think about the problem when it came time to log in to the extension. We ended up saying something along the lines of “check the box if you’re not using app.passit.io”. The default choice matters a lot.
Another key difference with email is that it's easy (the default) to find email providers that are overtly content-neutral, whereas Mastodon, for whatever reason, makes that shockingly difficult.
With email, you don't go to email.com, click a sign up link, then get a list of hundreds of email providers to choose from.
Also, the precedent for people looking into Mastodon is not email users looking for a more real time email client. It's Twitter users looking for Twitter on not-Twitter.com
The mere existence of a protocol isn’t the issue here. I think the problem is more that the protocol doesn’t have champions like your ISP/Microsoft/Google. Mastodon saying “come here then go somewhere else” isn’t good; it’d be better if there was a default option somehow.
It’s a common problem with open source; I worked on Passit and we had to think about the problem when it came time to log in to the extension. We ended up saying something along the lines of “check the box if you’re not using app.passit.io”. The default choice matters a lot.