But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
I didn’t know what the Fediverse was a week ago, and now I’m active on Lemmy and Mastodon. I think people are dramatically overstating how difficult it is to sign up. It’s not hard, it’s just new.
And besides, I don’t think the fediverse needs to take over at all. It just needs to have active, viable, engaging communities. As Iong as enough people end up here to sustain that, it doesn’t really matter if they overtake the places we’re coming from.
Feels like a smear campaign at this point. They’re making it sound like you have to dig through instances and code your own interface or something
I’ll be honest, “dig through instances and code your own interface” is kinda where I’m at right now with Lemmy. I love Beehaw as an instance, but because of the demo it’s attracted there are relatively niche topics I am interested in that it can’t support an active community for. Those communities are already humming along on lemmy.world – but I can’t interact with them because of the (justifiable) decision to defederate from them due to moderation concerns.
So where does that leave me? I am trying to stand up my own instance right now… but the build directions available don’t work for my homelab setup (for some reason the backend only responds to requests from localhost, which means I can’t set Lemmy up to work with my existing reverse proxy?). I guess I could go rooting around in the code to change that, but at that point I’m committed to maintaining a personal fork of Lemmy just to be able to use it in a way that is analogous to how I used Reddit… which just worked out of the box.
I really wish that in addition to federation, Lemmy offered some sort of OAuth-style portable identity that would allow users to interact directly with instances off their “home” one. As it stands, the Fediverse has ended up a bit more balkanized than I think was intended or anticipated
you could sign up for a different site which isn’t defederated from beehaw or the other instances you’re interested in. lemm.ee for instance.
Sure, I could, but for me the whole appeal of a federated service is its interconnected nature. If I have to create an account on the “right” instance to interact with all the communities I’m interested in – potentially repeatedly, given that operators may choose to defederate from each other at any time and for any reason – that has already defeated the purpose of the exercise.
I see this as a major driver of the “default instance” issue that both Mastodon and Lemmy have experienced. If you both have a hard time finding content off your home instance and have no guarantee of continued ability to interact with that content down the road, the safest choice of home instance becomes whichever is biggest, and from there the network effects just make the problem progressively worse over time. Federated services need some way to reduce the friction of traversing the Fediverse if they’re going to avoid that.
I guess I disagree with your assertion as to what is the ‘purpose’ of the fediverse. To me choosing associations is the point, so admins disconnecting from abusive instances fits well within that belief. If the fediverse meant accepting all input from all instances without question, I’d leave here as quickly as I did voat.
I don’t mind creating a couple accounts on different instances as need be. Though I’m also the kind of person who had a handful of reddit accounts for various purposes, so I understand my perspective isn’t likely the norm.
I agree though that based on your requirements, spinning up your instance might be the best bet.
I don’t disagree with your points, necessarily. I just think that the way most federated services function, there’s no way for the needs/concerns/feelings/whims of an instance operator to be met without also impacting the users of their instance in ways that might not have been necessary just to protect that one instance. I only ever had one Reddit account, and thought of my post history as something of a corpus that represented me to those who might be inclined to look, so to me portability of my federated Identity is important – without it Lemmy is just a bulletin board with extra steps. That said, it’s clear that our user cases differ, and that’s OK! For my part, I’m gonna keep trying to get this thing self-hosted…
Create an account on an instance like Lemmy.world. Subscribe to whatever you want. Problem solved?
I don’t know why you are looking to set up your own instance, that is not necessary for “normal” users at all.
Like Drew got no clue said, the issue is that the author can’t handle the tiny amount of friction encountered during the process. IMO, it keeps out those that wouldn’t be contributing anyway.
Edit: Our -> out
I disagree strongly with this view. One of the truly valuable elements of reddit is/was the shared knowledge for a lot of things that are not techy. As a somewhat recent homeowner, the r/homeimprovement subreddit and the mildly related ones have been invaluable. It’s populated by random homeowners of all types and experts in various professional and DIY fields. These are not people who are likely to migrate to Lemmy in droves and that’s a loss, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe some will make it and smaller communities might grow to have similar knowledge wells, but they won’t be as deep.
I’m all-in on the transition away from the social media giants, but there’s a lot about the simplicity of a non-federated platform that won’t carryover which will make the barrier to entry higher than many people want to navigate, and that is definitely a shame.
That’s something I hadn’t considered!
At this point, I’m not looking for a replacement, but an improvement. I will miss the niche groups in Reddit and especially the fact that I could find a specialist in dryer repair, saving me the cost of replacement or read all about Miele vacuums from a seasoned vacuum tech. The benefit of the Fediverse is tied to it’s size. It keeps the ecosystem more manageable and as far as I have seen, more humane. The people are nicer and I’ve seen an improvement in life since moving here because of it. The size and the type of environment surely go hand in hand!
I feel that this is just another growing pain, that I can still get help with a dryer or finding a good vacuum or whatever, it will just look different going through that process here.
I think that in time, more users will come and create further specialization in the platform, but at a rate that will allow for proper moderation and innovation to overcome performance and management hurdles.
Congratulations on the new home, or maybe congratudolences. It’s been a whole new phase of my life and a wonderful, intermittently painful, learning experience.
I told someone about uBlock as they were getting ads left and right, and I was told “oh no, I don’t wanna install anything!”
So if it’s not extremely frictionless, many people won’t even try…
(I agree with your second point BTW)
You can link people to the page to install uBlock origin and say “you just have to click install and the ads go away” and they just won’t do it. Very weird in my experience as I’m a bit of a tinkerer, so it’s hard to relate.
Lemmy and the larger Fediverse really shouldn’t even be trying to convert minimum effort users anyways. If someone isn’t willing to expend even a modicum of effort signing up for and understanding a new platform, I doubt they will be a very valuable addition to the community. The Fediverse needs to grow some more, but not at any cost.
This sounds kind of mean, but I kind of agree. One thing I miss from the earlier days of the internet was that communities could be more niche, and the slight barrier to entry of making a new account for a forum or something meant that you’d mostly get people who were very interested in a topic in the community. It feels kind of bad to be in favor of barriers for a community, but I think it can make a bit of a difference in the mix of people that you get and how the community feels.
This, so much. People will not load additional apps. And they will not give up ‘their’ Facebook.
People are fucking stupid bro. They just need that algorithm to tell them they dont even want to search for communities explore and learn.
I agree with you that it isn’t that difficult. I signed up on mastodon.social months ago. It was a little confusing about picking an instance so I just arbitrarily picked one. The same was true for lemmy. Now I’m on lemme.ee and behaw.org.
In the case of Matodon, I recently discovered the Explore option. There’s more than enough posts to keep me reading for hours. And most of them are interesting. Imagine reading an unfiltered Twitter feed. I don’t need Mastodon to get any bigger for my needs. It may even be better if it doesn’t get a huge membership. The same holds true for lemmy and kbin, bigger and better yes, but they don’t have to be a Reddit replacement.
When I joined there were a ton of posts recommending that you just aggressively follow people (in a positive way) and that’s led my feed to be full of artists, photographers and writers. Which has been awesome.
I don’t know if I’d want to hop back into using an algorithmic feed and, as you note, it’d probably become trash pretty fast.
Completely agree. I think the growth/winning mindset is subconsciously guiding people to make these criticisms. You don’t need to be part of the “Best” or “Largest” platform for that platform to be amazing and provide you value. Additionally, once I understood why instances are critical to keeping control of the fediverse in the hands of the community, I was excited about picking an instance to belong to.