this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.
Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.
Your ID doesn’t need to be tied to any given server. You can move around and change your “home” server at will. Or if preferred you could stand up your own server for your usage, hold your identify on there, and still engage with the rest of Lemmy / fediverse.
It’s less a design mistake and more a technical constraint. A users identify exists as, at a minimum, a database entry. That database needs to live somewhere that the various fediverse servers can talk to. But you have complete freedom in where that database entry is, and can change your mind later.
So it already doesn’t matter if you’re on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server - they all federate with each other (to varying degrees but that’s a slightly different conversation)
It matters in terms of keeping track of your subscriptions though, unless I'm missing something. I essentially need to decide if I'm going to use my account on server A and subscribe to all the federated content I want on server B, or vice versa. If A goes down or if I lose interest in it, I'll need to re-establish somewhere else and resubscribe everything.
I guess the answer is to host your own instance and federate everything, but federation doesn't seem 100% reliable and you also lose the local view.
Correct, as of now, but the point is that you can resub elsewhere. This is entirely impossible on centralised private platforms like Reddit.