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Am I the only one who can’t get used to Fediverse? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by s1vgm@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I'd like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:

I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
The content and style of each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances with lengthy domains.
Fediverse isn't truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.

These reasons prompted me to explore more decentralized networks, I mean truly decentralized networks, such as Nostr.

However, creating a Nostr account and saving the Recovery Phrases is challenging (I lost my first Nostr account due to the loss of Recovery Phrases). And generally speaking, the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.

I believe people should leave Twitter due to shadowbans and robots and Facebook due to privacy concerns, but I'm struggling to choose a platform to migrate to. Each has its drawbacks, making it difficult to decide.

I'd love to hear your opinions on this.

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[–] rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

like the Internet ten years ago

I would like that. I liked the internet ten years ago. I think today it's filled with yet more noise and lots of low-effort posts. But I don't know where Lemmy is headed. In August/September I was pretty active here and had lots of nice conversations and in the last few weeks I struggled a bit getting meaningful discussions going. And there seem to be a lot of posts where OP doesn't engage and just dumps a question. And people only reply to comments in order to point out mistakes.

I don't know your exactly problem. Maybe you're using Lemmy/Mastodon wrong?! If you mean there's not enough activity in niche interest communities, I agree...

each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances

I really like diversity, that's great. But why do you have to switch instances? The fediverse is supposed to be a connected network of instances. You should be able to do everything from everywhere, subscribe across instances and not needing to switch.

Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners

I think you confuse decentralized with anonymous / free speech / unmoderated platforms. Federated means it consists of several independent servers that get interconnected. Each server has it's own autonomy, rules and people who make decisions. (Distributed is yet another term for something slightly different.) If you mean something where nothing gets moderated and no-one banned, I suppose there are platforms like it. But I haven't yet seen an unmoderated place I like. They are fun for trolls and shitposters for like 3 days, then they become a place for hate and scams, ads and crypto schemes. Mostly posted by bots. And everyone normal will leave the platform so it's just toxic people mixed with lots of bots. You can post something but the only thing you get as a response is someone writing 25-times the n-word and some crypto-scam bots posting unrelated ads. So here, the will of server owners and moderators is what keeps this place running. Of course they don't always do the right thing. But still, we need them unless you have something different in mind. Maybe a better way to distribute power?

[–] lily33@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think there's an issue with coupling on the fediverse. For instance, if I run a community, but I'm not happy with the current instance policies, I can't easily move it to a new insurance (while keeping the memberships). It's also tricky to migrate my account - and it will lose me posting and vote history, edit/delete rights, etc. Finally, if I want to participate in two servers that have defederated each other, I have to maintain two accounts, which is a terrible user experience.

[–] rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

True. That are some Lemmy specifics and I'd like Lemmy to improve. But Lemmy has so many other issues. Moderation tools, UI bugs, missing error messages, you often can't write ampersands because the markdown interpreter is a bit stupid, you can't mute instances... There are currently some 500 issues open for the frontend and 200 more for the backend. There are lots of things to do.

I think moving communities is a bit low priority. Yes, it would be an awesome feature, but rarely needed. Migrating accounts is something I'd definitely like to see implemented. Other federated platforms have this or at least a way to export your account and import it somewhere else. With varying degrees of how well subscriptions are migrated in the process.

The defederation is another issue specific to Lemmy. In my eyes, Lemmy wasn't quite ready for the inrush of people once the Reddit API thing happened. Some moderation features are still missing to this day. People created communities everywhere without intending to use them but just to claim the name and have moderator rights. Admins did some rushed decisions and were a bit trigger-happy with the 'defederation'-button. Security issues surfaced. And the lack of a feature that allows users to block instances or defend themselves against things like brigading, makes it necessary for the admins to step in. And the way Lemmy works, defederation is unnecessarily complicated and has lots of unwanted side-effects like posts and comments being visible to some people but not for others, depending on the triangle of your instance, the instance of the other user and the instance that is home to that community.