Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).

However, there are a few things I'm curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!

What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don't see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

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[–] mbp@lemmy.sdf.org 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I find it's going to need to get even more convenient for the general public to be interested in it. Federation almost needs to be a 'background' process that the end user doesn't really need to deal with. Otherwise, it'll be a little too complicated or obscure to comprehend for most. I know it isn't rocket science but we're talking about the general public, here.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the biggest hurdle ive seen is the lack of federated sso/id. users expect the remote sites to know who they are, and then lose the process where they need to open that thread in their local instance.

[–] DisOne@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m a new user, so hope you don’t mind answering a question - tried looking this up but no joy: I understand the broad concept of federated sso/id, but what do you mean by opening threads in the local instance?

[–] kersploosh@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Here's an example. Say you want to visit the Engineering community on sh.itjust.works. The community lives at this URL:
https://sh.itjust.works/c/engineering

However, you are using an account at lemm.ee. In order to post or comment you need to access the community via lemm.ee, which means using this URL:
https://lemm.ee/c/engineering@sh.itjust.works

Going to the first URL is accessing the community directly.
Going to the second URL is accessing the community through your local instance. lemm.ee fetches the contents of the community and saves a local copy for you (and for all the other lemm.ee users). Any posts or comments you make get synced back to the community.

Edit: If you are using Lemmy through a smartphone app then don't worry about this distinction. The app is taking care of this for you and always accessing everything through your local instance.

[–] DisOne@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the extra context. Yes I’ve so far only accessed everything via smartphone app, but no doubt I’ll use my pc at some stage. Much to learn…

[–] CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !engineering@sh.itjust.works

[–] kersploosh@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks bot, but I did that intentionally.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

a user gets sent a link to a thread in some remote fediverse site.. which the browser dutifully opens. but then the user cant comment, because they are not logged in. user is confused. it is a common user story.

for some people this is obvious, for others its a problem. google/facebook kinda get around this kind of thing with an SSO process (login with google!)

at its root is the problem of finding remote communities for which one would want to subscribe.

what you Really do, is take the community/magazine/thread and subscribe to it over in your own instance, which will then allow you to comment in your local instance.

[–] DisOne@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Ok thanks - wasn’t aware it was possible to read anything without logging in