For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, whatâs stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?
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netsplits/defederation.
You canât just tell someone to register for any server, and they will be able to see everything. So they then have to choose a server, which takes effort, and can cause analysis paralysis.
Maybe that is exactly what we need to do, to spare them from the indecision. Recommend them to a specific instance to sign up and follow you (if in doubt, the instance we use). I suppose we can mention there are lots of choices, and those who are inclined that way will want to explore other servers, many are not, and for them pointing them at a server may be best.
Iâm just thinking that trying to say there are lots of networks, each with lots of servers etc, may be the problem.
Alternatively, should ask them some questions like do they want to post short format or long text format, and take into account a specific interest they have, and then we still recommend a server instance to them to join.
So for fellow ham radio operators, I just pointed them all to the ham radio Mastodon instance and said sign up there.
We can compose a list of instances with sane blocklists for each software and audit from time to time.
Yeah, but then the blocklists themselves become a centralized feature. Iâm not saying âdonât block the fascistsâ, just that itâs going to be hard to maintain a blocklist.
I can totally see the Fediverse going the way of email, as in you need a reasonably large amount of capital to maintain a well-respected, not defederated-from server.
By âsane blocklistsâ I meant small and auditable blocklists actually. There are instances like programming.dev, lemmy on sdf and the instance Iâm on that donât preemptively defederate from other instances. Thatâs what I meant.
I mean that Lemmy and the Fediverse is not big enough for Russian troll farms and US ad agencies to start up massive numbers of instances and drown us in bullshit, like with email. If it goes that way, blocklists will sadly not be enough.
Iâm not sure how this hypothetical issue that may happen in a far future relates to what issue I addressed in my comment, actually.
Could be interesting
https://fediseer.com/ can be used for something like that.
The ability to âfloatâ between servers would go a long way to improve this. Make an account on one server, then come across another that you vibe with more, and single button press and youâve transferred. All you subs, comment history etc are preserved (for overlapping federated servers). No idea how to implement this, but it feel achievable, perhaps with a quick step to set up a new password and username if it was taken.
Once the fediverse gains significant traction there will be a huge coordinated media smear campaign to associate it with extremism, CP, violent crime, terrorism etc⌠The âwonât anyone think of the childrenâ attack will be leveraged to ââregulateââ the fediverse (probably by legacy social media like Meta alongside the security state), aka transform it into regular old centrally controlled social media. Upload filters, encryption back doors, know your customer laws etc⌠Non-regulated decentralized social media will be attempted to be made illegal, not sure if it will succeed.
So yeah eventually any true decentralized social media will have to move completely into the âdarknetâ.
Controversial and probably unpopular opinion:
Iâm someone who hates advertising with a burning and seething passion, and Iâm no lover of capitalism, but from a systemic standpoint thereâs a reason most open source projects burn out and go nowhere, and for-profit businesses have a higher chance of survival, because thereâs direct incentives (you know money/food) to keep making commercial software and increasing itâs user base, but there isnât for hobbyist and open source software. Especially in the case of a social network that is only as valuable as the content and users on it, this might be a long term systemic issue.
You know like 50% of new businesses fail within 5 years, right? I donât have stats on open source projects, but it seems to me those are more likely to fail because theyâre run by one person who loses interest than because they donât have a profit motive.
Yes, that is a remarkably low failure rate. 99.9% of open source projects sit unused and abandoned after 5 years.
Theyâre run by one person because they donât have a profit motive, so they donât need to hire QA, market research etc. etc. All the parts of a software company that help to keep continuously developing their software and make sure users are happy.
Dude, yes, theyâre run by one person because itâs a hobby. This is like saying 99.9% of stories donât get published because there was no profit motive. There usually isnât when it starts, just a drive to create or fill a perceived void, or even just practice. I write damn near every day with zero profit motive.
Linux wasnât started with a profit motive. None of the open source BSDs were either. As far as I can tell, theyâre still not particularly profit motivated. Neither are a lot of other open source projects that have lasted ages. Whereâs the profit motive behind Bash? Itâs been around for 34 years.
An inability to pay bills can stop a person from working on a project, but at the end of the day itâs usually not profit that keeps an open source project alive. Itâs popularity and passion.
None of what you wrote argues against what I wrote. I didnât say that open source projects canât be successful, I pointed out that they do not have the same structural incentives to continue or to keep changing to suit their users.
There also havenât been many open source consumer facing applications that have seen the success that backend and low level systems have. Largely because stuff like Linux / BSD / Bash / etc are built to serve specific functions with clear technical criteria that can be specified, met, and checked off a procurement list. Social networks and consumer facing applications on the other hand have to delight their users and keep them opening them up rather than any competitive distractions. Thatâs not a clear technical problem that an engineer can crank away at and implement, thatâs an ongoing fuzzier problem that requires more stuff along the lines of continuous market research and product development.
And while yes, in some cases itâs just purely popularity and passion that drive open source projects, in many many many ongoing open source projects itâs in reality, corporations funding their development (directly or through employee eng time) because theyâve built some of their infrastructure on it and itâs cheaper to pool infrastructure resources than try to build their own version.
Itâs a nice narrative that Reddit became Reddit just because it was this greatly built platform that served as the perfect forum for everything, but the reality is that during Redditâs growth face they did a ton of stuff to juice usage, like create fake comments and manipulate upvote downvote counts to make it seem like more people were engaging with your stuff, etc. And Reddit still exists as a competitor that is actively trying to take Lemmyâs user base back. Donât get me wrong, Iâm here because I prefer a transparent, non-engagement driven algorithm and am doing my part to contribute here and not on Reddit, but Iâm also not blind to the structural headwinds that Lemmy / the wider fediverse will have to overcome.
Fair enough.
There are a lot of fediverse projects that could really really use some marketing to explain what theyâre doing and who they are for. And for developers, hey, I hate corporations but Iâm generous. I would absolutely subscribe for features or perks or whatever.
For Lemmy:
Overall, it still requires significant willingness to either accept missing features and content, or jump through technical hoops to regain some.
My experience on other fediverse platforms was similar, which most often resulted in me staying away from that particular service for now.
@Spzi @ALostInquirer Stream aggregation would be huge for me. Itâs the main reason I donât spend as much time on lemmy.
Onboarding. The fact that you have to choose an instance to join while creating an account is essentially forcing people to make a decision for which, unless theyâve done some reading, theyâll have no idea of the implications. Itâs such a weird concept for new users - they have to know about a thing before theyâve had experience with a thing.
Even if it doesnât really matter which instance you begin with, the experience will be different, and thereâs a sense of âpressureâ at the point of signup, which doesnât exist outside of the Fediverse.
Would you not say itâs more like it doesnât exist to the same degree? Not that that diminishes your point, mind, only that in my experience online Iâve found similar when it comes to other online communities, say when deciding different Discord servers to join and some requiring waiting, reacting to be able to chat, or more rarely, have 2 factor authentication enabled of all things.
Before that, and more a sign of my age I guess, it would have been different forums, different chat rooms, and the like. Each similar in basic functionalities, but different experiences and a different sense of âpressureâ to each.
I donât think itâs the same with Discord because you already know which server you want to join, even if there are hurdles.
With federated instances you are told they all do the same thing and that it doesnât matter, but in the same breath youâre told thereâs still criteria to consider (number of users, location, some have a main theme etc.)
I know itâs old, but MMO servers used to have this kind of criteria.
You would just a server next to you, speaking a language you did, with a reasonable amount of users
very similar to IRC also
I can see this going the way of Minecraft servers. Little banner ads that explain a communityâs perks. Heh. This is a concern to me too, and the effort involved is whatâs keeping me from joining and posting on other Fediverse apps immediately, and Iâm putting it off.
The biggest issues for me are:
No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply setâand only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.
Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.
Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).
I donât think this is a bad thing. Having centralization leads to one narrative taking over the post. With more decentralization, there is a natural way for different kinds of conversation to take root.
Also, this is going to occur much more when people get the ability to block instances anyway.
This is one of the ideal use cases for Solid, in development by MIT and Tim Burners-Lee. Basically, you host a central store of data, including one or more user accounts, and allow access to it from other services.
This was the original premise of app.net - a social service from years back. They built a âsocial backboneâ. They offered you a single place where your identity and friends were housed. Other people could build apps on top of the backbone.
So you would join say a clone of Instagram and all your friends were still there. And your account still worked. Or they had a Twitter clone. Same deal. It was a single sign-on social account/identity/social graph that was separate from the apps. So things could just plug in.
Worked great. But it was a paid service. And came out right at peak Facebook so it died off.
Ooh neat. Too bad that it was paid. And centralized/private for that matter.
@Feathercrown @modulus
Iâd be more comfortable with self-hosting my actual data somewhere, and just having an instance or the central store point to my data. Iâd want to get to apply rules for who gets access to my data. It would be a lot easier to spin up a small data store with a few tools on it than a full instance.
that should not be true. if all the instances involved in a comment section are fully federated with each other, the comments are the same on all of those instances.
things get complicated when there is defederation involved⌠but the base case is âeveryone can see the same set of comments no matter the instance.â
is this correct or there is more?
More of that, only comments from instances defederated by your instance wonât be shown.
As far as I can tell, this is incorrect. If thereâs a post on instance A, a reply from instance B, and someone on instance C follows the OP on A but not the RP on B, they will only see the OP without the reply.
Source: I very often notice this because I run a single-user instance, and when I open a thread itâs incomplete, lacking posts from instances that I have not suspended.
Well, thereâs replication lag of course, but afaik youâre right.
For me, aside from picking initially between kbin and Lemmy and then picking an instance (and the whole concept of instances), it was not having an algorithmically created feed. It took a bit to wrap my mind around since all of the social media apps and sites I was used to (and still use) provides this.
I was confronted with building my own feed by topic of interest (aka community or magazine) or else.face a firehose of all content from all local or federated instances. I mean, I did it, so it wasnât that big a barrier, but it still required effort and conscious decision making on my part just to set up the thing to be usable. Itâs probably one of the reasons why I donât use Mastodon that much, because itâs easier to join/subscribe to topics in kbin and Lemmy (at least in my experience). Mastodon seems to be for following individuals and organizations, and thatâs even more work (for me).
One way to deal with this issue in Mastodon is to follow hashtags instead. Personally, it is also not for me, but it is still better than following individuals.
This is kind of an interesting one to me, not because I disagree or anything, but because at least personally, when Iâve tried to use corporate social media, I felt like I also had to do a lot of manual feed building/curation to get it to be worth anything. However, I do think where some of the algorithmic stuff helped a little was in the suggestions of similar or related pages/users, albeit somewhat rarely.
More than the algorithms it was simply the fact that it was a single platform where you knew they might be & so could search for them, so maybe it was a mixture of those details for you too?
The platforms copied the design of centralized services without making enough adjustments to accommodate the different UX that a decentralized federated system brings. Some things that I think should be standard that currently arenât:
Implement these and the experience would be much better.
Extremist political propaganda from instances like Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and Exploding Heads.
I wonât recommend it to anyone in itâs current state.
Same here. I guess Iâve made too many enemies from those communities and I suspect that my username has been put on some brigading community. Almost every comment gets downvoted instantly and my inbox is filled with pro-Tankie DMs and threats.
Itâs kinda funny but I feel like Lemmy has run its course for me
I abandoned an account because Lemmygrad users followed me around and downvoted everything I posted. I think it had around -3000 karma.
Theyâre happy to harass people as they spread their authoritarian propaganda.
@awwwyissss
And #NAFOs donât? /s
@PP_BOY_
While I donât fully share that sentiment, I acknowledge itâs a point frequently brought up.
So, looking for a compromise ⌠is there hope in growth? Like, with numbers big enough, it should become feasible to have an instance which strictly blocks all political leanings of âyour despised flavorâ, and still have enough content to look at.
Would that be a solution for you, for example @awwwyissss@lemm.ee or @PP_BOY_@lemmy.world? Lemmy as a whole would still have âbad stuffâ, but there would be a âclean instanceâ which you can recommend, from which no âbad stuffâ can be seen.
I simply skipped thinking about better wordings for âsome expressionsâ. Please bear with me. I didnât mean to judge.
Yeah if there was a stable instance that filtered political extremism well I might recommend it to others
defederation. Set up my own instance to choose myself on who I want to defederate with
Lack of documentation.
Recent example is Firefish. I love the platform, and Iâm okay with discovering stuff on my own, but I can get why other people can be lost without exhaustive documentation
@Blaze @ALostInquirer Yeah documentation is reaaaaaallyyyy lacking. Mastodon you kinda understand if you look enough, but Misskey ⌠If you donât use feature you wonât find any information unless someone wrote a guide which is problem in it self as guides most likely are notes so it wonât be easy to find one. Add to that error messages that donât explain problem, like why people canât make response to Kbin thread after some time(some did, some get error) https://imgur.com/a/3wjEcCb
There is this trend of mass downvoting your account if you disagree with political propaganda on any spectrum and they follow any instance. We need a workaround for mass downvoting.
I need an extensive guide on how to find the right Fediverse spaces for the social experience Iâm trying to get. Ie. App marketing, instance marketing
The Fediverse needs to offer, on the surface non-technical, things that corporate social medias donât currently offer.
Ie. Killer app features