this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Fediverse
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Yeah. Eventually there’ll be another meltdown. There always is. At that point , it’d be great to have established structures, a simplified onboarding and a compelling app ecosystem.
Biggest problems I see with Lemmy right now is servers going down, defederation for petty reasons, and duplicated communities fracturing a user base. I’ve also noticed users with the same name on different instances but it’s not always clear if that’s the same user or a clone. i basically quit Reddit cold Turkey when I lost use of Apollo and I’d been there since well before the Digg migration. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Lemmy community resolves the issues I noted, no doubt they will.
you can't be mad at both subreddits being too large and controlled by a few power mods, and lemmy having too many duplicate communities all run by different mods.
it is the core virtue of the federation model in the first place, in that if a community on an instance goes down, you have the others as backup.
past a certain size, the content that comes through subs/comms passes by too fast to be digested in time, and other content gets buried, so smaller communities should be more digestable.
as for cross-platform user verification check, lemmy can implement mastodon's method of instance A giving you a secret to be put to instance B, and if it sees that secret from B, then it knows the user at B is you.
I’m not mad, I’m just noting issues that are confusing for new users. Duplicate communities don’t serve as backups. They are distinct from each other. A community going down just means it is gone, for practical purposes. Ive noticed that usually just one community of a given name has any active participation, the rest are placeholders with a post or two. Worse than creating communities as placeholders are Reddit mirror communities that are just populated by bot posts.
The other two are being worked on but onboarding will always be tricky as people have to get their head around instances. It's not too tricky but still a hurdle.
The join a server page could do with an improvement - perhaps let people add their location and interests and offer them a more filtered list with some data like active users and uptime.
i got on lemmy without understanding how instances work, and even now, after 2 months and +100 comments, i know very little
I take this as a big point for "see how well you can do without caring about it". And think talking about it should be kept to a minimum during onboarding. Although it's understandable why pages like https://join-lemmy.org/ talk so much about it, even about hosting your own server!
This is from nerds to nerds, in a wholesome way. But most people aren't nerds, and as you prove, don't need to get into the details to use it, enjoy it, participate and contribute.
My vision is: Hide all the tech talk in 'advanced signup' and make the default signup process as quick and easy as possible.
I agree, you want bums in seats as quickly and effortless as possible. Your average user coming from reddit just wants an "all" feed they can use to curate their own front page, they don't really know, care, or want to learn about the plumbing underneath. The ones that do care will figure it out as theres plenty of resources available.
Knowing very little about the technical side - and speaking only from my experience trying to get my own account set up - I almost think the fediverse need a dedicated, standalone sign up instance (or series of instances) that has no posting enabled, but is automatically federated to the X most popular instances - so that apps and web interfaces can create simple default sign ups for new users without them needing to understand what instances even are.
Something like "lemmy.gateway" that can act as a home for the user account that then looks at the instances where the content actually happens, that can have high availability and redundancy in the event of server load on the popular instances, and that "just works" for your average reddit migrant so they don't have to go diving into instance details to dip their toe in the water. That way your "content instances" can go up or down without impacting new user signups, your apps can work to load popular posts even if what would normally be your home instance is down, and you can decouple things a bit - maybe your "gateway" lemmy instance can drop some code to run leaner since it doesn't have to worry about posting content.
To fund it you'd need some selfless souls, or perhaps agreement between major instances to shell out some revenue to host the sign up instance network, with the idea that getting users in to the fediverse generically is just as important as getting them on specific instances.
I have no idea if this is even possible but from a new user flow, if the intent is to maximise active users, you just want to get people "in" so they can eyeball, vote and post - then let learn how lemmy is different. Not the other way around.
Like driving my car. I haven't got a clue how it all works under the hood but I know enough to get me where I want, when I want.
Absolutely! I love the steps Mastodon is taking. Basically when you click join from the main page you get an account on mastodon.social and it just works. You really need to dig around to find other instances.
I'm hoping there's an instance that figures out how to become popular and financially sustainable enough to be able to support that scale. Maybe it's lemmy.world or maybe it's another one in the future.
That's quite good going - although it could be that,.unless you run an instance, there isn't actually much to know and the little you know is all you need to know. It's a hurdle, but a low one.
I kinda wish the Fediverse took an SSO approach to instance sign-in, where you can log into your account that's on your instance, from any instance that is federated with yours.
The sign in would be handled entirely by your instance, and it would then give something like a JWT token to the federated instance to certify that you are signed in.
There is a difference already tho.
Early reddit didn't have a gigantic metric fuckload of meme and shitpost users. We do now.