this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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If I wasn't a tech nerd I would have given up on signing up for Mastodon and Lemmy. There is a lot of focus on how instances work and it seems a bit overwhelming. I had a lot of internal, 'what if I make the wrong choice', or 'how can I move if I don't like the community' type questions. So being the nerd I am I researched the crap out of it and overwhelmed myself and said fuck it and just chose the popular instances since I know that I can move at a later date.
I personally think this format is favored by a lot of the demographic you mentioned. Most of us, I am generalizing here, grew up being active members in bulletin board systems. Then Reddit came along basically murdered the BB, but there was a good community to interact with. Now Reddit is basically unusable in my opinion because the community doesn't care about the content or the people behind the screen. That brings us here. We learned so much of our trade, laughed a lot, and made real friendships on these types of system and it is a place a lot of us feel comfortable.
100% this
I’m a tech nerd and software engineer and even I struggled to figure out how to signup. Most people I know just want something that works. And those things tend to be centralized because of ease of use. The Fediverse isn’t easy to use, and makes the user make major decisions before even signing up or understanding the tech.
Eventually there should probably be account migration and a somewhat “central” account management instance that most users are on, with the option to migrate their user to other instances.
Yep. Certified non-tech nerd here. And not quite 30, either.
I was awfully close to not figuring out Lemmy enough to make an account and participate.
I still don't understand exactly what's going on, but I can confirm that my first time visiting was extremely confusing. So many terms I was completely unfamiliar with, and no clear way for me to jump in easily (like you were describing with having to make important decisions before signing up/understanding). Truly the only reason I ended up successfully making it here was that I saw a post on the instance I ended up joining, welcoming reddit refugees so I figured - well, I guess I could try this one. And that was after I had searched around online to figure out what the heck the fediverse, instances, etc, were.
The barrier to entry is really high for those of us with little to no tech knowledge. And I was really motivated, I reeeeally wanted to commit to leaving reddit. I imagine those who are considering joining but aren't quite as motivated just won't make it. :(
I've been in tech for 25 years and it still took me a day or two to figure it out after I made a account. So no worries, you're in good company 🙂
My experience was exactly like you describe, I see we even ended up using the same instance. Only reason I chose this one was because it was the top option in the Memmy app.
A central account instance rather defeats the point of a federated system.
With federation it's ensured that any single instance is only a small part of the whole, and that if any instance goes down (or worse, goes rogue and becomes a bad actor) then the impact of that is minimised. All users being registered on a single instance is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket.
I do totally understand from the perspective of new users that it's hard to understand what to do or how to do it but that is a problem that could be better addressed with clearer onboarding. e.g "Choose any one of these recommended instances to sign up. It doesn't matter which - you'll be able to see the same content and communities across all of Lemmy no matter which you pick"*
*mostly, but close enough
To be honest, I’m still not sold on federation, and that’s going to be a huge hurdle to overcome with the general public.
I think its the only way to not be completely dependent on some single entity.
So far we have seen all of them go bad with time. At least with federation, you and me can talk with no corporation in the middle, which brings me back to the lovely feeling of the 90's with BBS's and forums. Before the corps took over and put ads everywhere, and basically took the world hostage.
If something big happens, ordinary people need to be able to talk without censorship. And its going to be very hard to censor a distributed network like Lemmy.
I think it’s a huge advantage. It’s not that confusing that different websites share content. I think all it would take is something like “sign up for the site you like or one in your state” and for the default home pages to be All vs Local.
Does anyone know of any Game Theory-esque analysis of how late-stage Fediverse is supposed to work? What's the end game? What happens to the Fediverse with all the different kinds of players involved at this point?
I see each topic having their own instance, a giant web of interest connected content servers... I'll call it, the internet 😄 For real though, this shit feels like the old days back in the 90s ♥️
Choosing an instance is no more confusing than choosing an email provider. I signed up on several right away. I figured I'd stick with the one I liked best, but since they all run the same software it makes little difference. One instance lost its domain, another is constantly being DOSed. Otherwise it's simple.
Does it? Would it not be possible for a minimal global account system to exist, which ONLY handles logging in and identity? Any user-related data could still exist in instances, not centralized.
I am pretty new to this type of system so maybe I am wrong but it does seem like both the biggest barrier to wider adoption and rather solvable: in current terms, imagine if the "login" instance had no communities, only account log in, while other instances have no log in, but integrate the "central" one. In case decentralization is wanted, I think it'd be possible to have multiple "login" type instances exist in a consensus, at which point problems and solutions start looking similar to cryptocurrency, but without the need to deal with "currency" or any of those ethical landmines - it'd just need to do the task of multiple instances agreeing to dataset of existing users.
Does it make sense to fave one central e-mail account management server? Email is a federated system, though it's becoming less federated all the time.
This is a problem for potential growth. The language surrounding the Fediverse, the people communicating it's strengths, the wild west flavor, and the content within the sites themselves are going to be geared towards that demographic. Late Gen-X and early Millennials are probably going to feel at home here but if we don't work towards making the Fediverse more inclusive to other demographics it won't be adopted as much as we would like.
And? That's good. Facebook grew originally by being exclusive. You had to be in college, and in a particular college. Lots of things grow by invite only.
People love exclusivity, even if there is no reason for it. Apple maintains exclusivity through cost, for basically the same hardware. As long as instances have more than like 500 users, they will be fine.
Lemmy already has growing pains. Why would you want to make them bigger? Let the owners grow their instances at their own pace.
Boomer, here. The fediverse is the first thing I've seen that has the potential to replace the old USENET (also a federated system). Unfortunately, Lemmy has similar weaknesses/vulnerabilities to USENET which was destroyed by SPAM, high resource (compute, bandwidth, admin time...), and an influx of newbs (AoL).
Like reddit, Lemmy discourages long lived threads, which is unfortunate. But the longer Lemmy remains the home of linux geeks, the better, IMHO. I don't have a burning need to see the newest pop culture memes.
luckily we have the ability to sort posts by "New Comments" just like old school forums do
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
Yeah, I think framing it similar to the old days might help, but I could be wrong. Like, you aren't signing up for (just to web-equivalent) PHP Fusion or something, you're signing up for your gaming clan's forum, or your roleplay group, or your Canadian phreak BB. The difference with Lemmy is just that you also indirectly sign up to receive content from a lot of other places using the same protocol.
IMO, I think the framing/abstraction will make or break the future of the paradigm for mainstream consumption. Not to get into another repeat of the EEE discussion, but assuming nothing nefarious from something like Threads, that would mean people start an account there and then find a niche group with their friends to go hang out on instead.
I also have to push back against the pushback against the paradigm going mainstream, because again IMO a move back toward decentralized platforms is really important for the future of the internet and quite frankly the global economy.
Just editing to expand, but I think maybe there's a problem in framing Lemmy or Mastodon as communities in themselves, because it really conflicts with the model of instancing and email that is being used to describe them.
Best analogy I keep coming back to is an instance is like a PHP forum where it can talk to and display other forums.
That's how I framed it to a fandom friend.
I said... imagine back to when there were the two main fourms for our favorite author? Now imagine if you could sign up as a user for one... but the forums can talk to one another so you can post on the other too, but your username will reflect the domain of the one you made your username on.
And defederation is when the two factions of fandom get into some fandom drama and decide not to let members of the other board talk to them anymore, lol.
It's like one part forum, one part irc with distinct chat rooms around a topic, and one part signing up for a new email address, where the place you do it becomes part of your email address.
After choosing, it's just "sign up, install one of the apps and sign in again, start reading or subscribing" - so not a world of difference from someone who has just that e.g. Threads or Reddit or a certain discord is 'their community'?
I'm not a tech nerd and still managed to figure it out. I can tell when something starts to suck and reddit did just that.
maybe we should stop calling them instances and start calling them proxies?