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.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Fediverse
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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.
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.
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.
Fragmentation will be a huge problem if we want Lemmy and Kbin to succeed. We can't have 45000 technology communities with 45000 duplicate posts with 45000 different discussions under these posts. We need a way to unify all this in the clients and that, to me, seems like a pretty big issue as you can't just get all the posts and merge them without ddosing all the Lemmy instances or without other unwanted side effects
I'm not saying Lemmy/Kbin are perfect but fragmentation is a red herring. Reddit has a HUGE degree of fragmentation, look at how many news subs there are or wrestling versus squaredcircle ect. It's not really an issue either, take the wildly different approaches Games takes to Gaming; each community serves a related, but unique purpose.
The true battle here is userbase and thankfully those numbers are climbing at a sustainable rate. If we ever get into the hundreds of millions of users it won't matter how many cooking subs there are, there would be enough unique and viable ones that everyone would have just the one they were looking for.
There was always a main one though, the others were splinters that happened after the main one succeeded. The problem here is they are all small, all the same name, and competing with each other to become the main one.
You can have /r/technology and /r/tech and /r/technews etc...
It's a problem that resolves itself. One community or the other will "win".
And if not, whatever. On Reddit, my home city has two subreddits. The content between them is slightly different (different mod teams) and the comments on duplicate posts are different. I subscribed to both to see slightly different opinions and avoid echo chamber.
It doesn't help when the same user posts the same thing over a bunch of instances. It's obnoxious.
This is what drives me crazy. Just pick an instance to post on.
That's not a bug but a feature, I love having other options if the main one goes batshit or corporate.
I disagree. To me, instances are like countries with their own constitution (rules) and police (mods). This means that two communities in different instances may seem the same, but they are not, because they have to follow the rules and culture of their instance.
Just like a PS5 club in Germany will not be the same as the PS5 club in the US because they will be culturally different. I think it will take some time for the Fediverse to think this way.
For me, this is better. Instead of having one giant technology community where your comments and posts are drowned out, we can have different technology communities with their own culture and norms, just like we visit different countries. Your comment and posts will be not drowned out.
It is a different paradigm to the centralised one of Reddit.
why can’t we?
I saw an issue that would allow admins to just point a sub to another server, if that community grows more. seems like a reasonable idea.
We’re going to need a bigger boat
Nah just spread the load over bunch smaller boats, a few dinghys and a couple of cruise ships to keep it going in the right direction.
Lemmy/Kbin will follow the same path.
I hope it's not the same toxification path at least.
It’s 100% going to be.
Lemmy isn’t “special”. I’ve already seen hot takes and other things to get people riled up on Lemmy.
sadfasdf
r/politics problem isn’t that it’s infested with maga nonsense….idk what you’re even talking about.
R/politics problem is that it’s a doomer cesspool that doesn’t actually like talking about politics, but likes to complain and talk about Trump all the time.
I’m a borderline socialist, so pretty left leaning, and that subreddit is way too toxic for me. I’m not interested in that type of discourse.
Let me clarify because I can tell I implied too much and it just ended up not being communicated. That's on me.
My point is an issue with moderation. The simple fact is toxic behavior is allowed because mods/admins/etc. on forums tend to be too cautious with the ban hammers unless a rule is explicitly violated. If someone is disruptive to the community and constantly starting fights, even if they don't "break a rule on the side bar," the mods at /r/politics needed to just show them the door but never did. I don't know if it's a well meaning but misguided commitment to "Free Speech :TM:" or concern about the optics to the community or whatever, regardless if there is someone in your hen house riling up all the hens every day, it doesn't matter if they're a wolf or a hen. Kick them out.
At present I have not seen many admins with the stomach to enforce like that. But if we want to actually not be reddit all over again, that's what it will take. Beehaw I think has some decent ideas about how to handle this problem via defederation, and I think it's a real solution that needs to be explored more, but ultimately admins need to just kick people out when they're particularly toxic and disruptive.
The reason I mentioned the "stop the steal" crowd in particular is because 100% of the time it is just a horrible flame war the moment they pop in. Dozens of removed comments and just insults hurled everywhere.
Admins did take steps against far-right instances. But I didn't even mean politics, but more stuff like Redditors coming here and trying to import toxic stuff that Reddit used to allow, the whole "I'm gonna stalk you and downvote you everywhere" retaliation mentality because of karma, the low-effort comments and the flame baits (which Reddit loved since it created more engagement) etc...
I've already seen a couple of downvote-you-everywhere people being called out for doing it (votes are accessible in ActivityPub, and very easy to see in kbin).
I don't think it's as easy for them to flourish here.
So far on Lemmy, whenever I see someone comment this, it's because they're mad Reddit got "toxic towards my free speech to stupid ass MAGA nonsense". Is that what you mean by Reddit being "toxified"?
I think there's a lot of people who desire free speech outside of MAGA people.
But I even believe they should have free speech too. Free speech is the most important element of our society imo.
The problem is some people only believe in free speech for their ideas. They want to censor the other side.
I believe in free speech but disruptions should be prevented.
Reddit took a weird approach to Covid which caused a lot of misinformation to proliferate without any discussion.
People were banned if they questioned the efficacy of masks. Leading experts in the field were saying they were not effective. Yet, Reddit was trying to determine what the “truth” was.
I believe it should be discussed. Now we it resorts to just name calling or cliche such as follow the science. It needs to be put down.
Passing ideas and debate are good for society.
True. I think it is important to understand the social media landscape is much different now. 2008 was when Facebook was getting started too.
This so much. The fediverse is young, and still in its early stages, still ironing out a bunch of bugs and issues. It's only growing so well because the reddit admins keep finding more feet to shoot themselves in
Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I can agree with this to a degree, but can't we just not think of reddit? I mean, back then, I don't recall redditors obsessing over other sites as much as I have seen on lemmy. Digg was the top dog, and I don't recall daily threads about reddit's numbers or how it wasn't matching up.
It was just it's own thing and not constantly comparing itself to it's alleged competition. I feel like that helped it grow into it's own thing, and we should give lemmy a chance to do the same instead of trying to turn it into reddit 2.0. That said, I might just be forgetting—there could've been constant 'sky-is-falling-because-we-aren't-Digg' posts—but I just don't recall them.
I can agree with this to a degree, but can’t we just not think of reddit? I mean, back then, I don’t recall redditors obsessing over other sites as much as I have seen on lemmy.
Back then, centralized corporate social media wasn't seen as the clear and present danger to society that it is now, in our post-Cambridge-Analytica world.
It's not enough to see Lemmy and Mastodon and Friendica succeed. Spez and Musk and Zuckerberg need to fail.
Digg refugee from back then. The amount of people coming over wasn't as significant as we see today. But yes there were lots of posts about how to use Reddit, tools to make Reddit look prettier or more like Digg. Diggers found the subreddit subscription confusing. Literally all the posts we see today from Redditors coming to Lemmy.
2008? Jesus I was a b/tard old-fag in those days and the hate for reddit was unreal. I had no idea it was the 9gag of its day.
We don't need to become Reddit
True. Give Lemmy time.
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