I’m slowly trying to build my feed and while Beehaw offers plenty of great communities with great engagement, I’d like to add a few more to give me a little more variety. Open to anything really!
I’m slowly trying to build my feed and while Beehaw offers plenty of great communities with great engagement, I’d like to add a few more to give me a little more variety. Open to anything really!
Why is lemmy.world having a lot of active communities unfortunate? I’m a bit new here. Is there already drama between communities? Or some other reason, like slow servers or something?
Edit: Just saw that it’s defederated. Any reason? I was worried about this being a thing, having to subscribe to other communities and shuffle subscriptions. What a pain. Hope it doesn’t happen often.
Beehaw is defederated from lemmy.world for the reasons listed here.
Ah I see. Those are solid reasons, I don’t blame them for defederating. Still kinda sucks, I was worried about this being a problem. Having multiple accounts and re-managing subscriptions each time it happens is going to be a nightmare without any centralization. I wonder if it’s going to be a barrier for less tech savvy users. I suppose these types of problems can be solved over time.
I personally think people need to be more comfortable with multiple logins for social media, rather than putting everything into a single basket. Improvements to the front end + apps would help with that as well.
As with most things, there’s trade offs. From a usability stand point, it’s a pain. I try to keep the amount of accounts I have to a minimum. They’re easy to lose track of, hard to keep them secure when I don’t remember how many accounts I have out there (I don’t have many accounts, so keeping track is easy right now), can’t always account for the security of the platform, end up reusing similar or same passwords and user names a lot, etc… Yeah I can work around all of that, but that’s part of the problem… I’m also lazy :)
The part that I think would be most annoying is just knowing which servers got defederated at any given time, creating new accounts, shuffling subscriptions. Luckily it doesn’t look like it forgot what I was subscribed too, so I just had to make a new account and then re-subscribe to everything. But if this grew to the size of reddit, it’s almost nightmare material thinking about the drama between communities and constantly reshuffling. Bleh.
I mean I’m fine with it, not trying to complain here :) Just some things I’m worried about is all.
So basically I’m struggling with a couple of facets of the fediverse that I don’t see how they can work out.
One is that I think it’s an overall good and healthy thing to have potentially several different takes on communities. Yes, this can fall into an ‘echo chamber’, but it also just helps and is nice to be around people who are similar to you. I think the internet can absolutely handle multiple versions of the ‘gaming’ community, just as much as it can handle multiple versions of the ‘politics’ community. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr all have a different vibe and I’d like to see Lemmy offer the same. And I don’t think that vibe needs to necessarily come from a different format. We’d all probably been a bit better off if there’d been a few more reddit’s around.
Which brings me to my second issue. It’s hard to build a ‘vibe’ without at least some control of who can interact. This is the problem Beehaw has faced. At the end of the day, you need to be able to keep people out. Which means that a login, by design, cannot interact with the entirety of the fediverse, because that would mean no one could be blocked or that we’d all have to agree on how to run our communities. Unlike email, I don’t personally feel like my lack of ability to see or comment on some alt-right communities post is a problem.
My last issue, is that I don’t feel like instances can scale. My guess is that for a pretty good community to form, you need to be closer to 2-20 million users. I like Beehaw. But it’s clear it’s struggling. But I don’t see how the fediverse could ever truly take off as a concept unless we could hit that threshold. And I don’t see how any regular, volunteer instance admin could run a site for that many people. So I feel like we need some sort of distributed computing model, where instance owners team up to create a ‘super-instance’ and act as overall site admins for a community of 2-20 million people are so. Individual instances can go down or up as admins burn out or get brought in and the overall site is managed collectively. If one admin goes rogue, the others can defederate and kick them out.
And in a world with super-instances, I’d have a login for my chill vibes Behaw super-instance, maybe another for an super-instances focused solely around sports, maybe another on a ‘free speech absolutist’ platform because Beehaw became too heavy handed about something, etc.
I am curious why people should have multiple accounts? My thought is that my account is me. Yes, I have different elements to my personality and interests, but I am the sum of those. If everything is in one account, that account better reflects who I am. It also makes me more hesitant to respond in a snarky manner because that does not reflect who I am.