Fediverse

A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.

The goal was never to convince people who don't know how email works to join, it's to convince an average reddit user to join.

The fediverse being "endless wars about who is federated" is not really true, is it?

Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don't connect with people you don't. It's as simple as that.

Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world? Because that's a big part of what broke the internet in the first place...

99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.

I'm so sick of this dumb ass argument...

People who complain about "servers" need to tell me what they think "the internet" is. The existence of servers didn't stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?

Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I'm going to be totally honest honest here: I don't think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.

These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don't give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.

We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That's the only "war" I have seen here.

Lemmy has good UI, the defaults set are just bad and most people will give up before discovering Photon etc.

Something like https://phtn.app/ really should be the default

I found a beautiful web client for Lemmy that I wish was the default experience. It would surely help Lemmy in gaining popularity.

here's the link: https://phtn.app/

IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It's further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That's going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with "good." So there's definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.

The problem is content, there isn't any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.

I just think that unless there's a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.

Maybe it’s personal bias but I’d put a lot more weight into the comments about

• too few members
• wtf is multiple servers?

While I understand the power, the ideal of multiple federated servers, I still see it as an impediment for use. I know there’s online descriptions but I fail to see why I need to research and choose a server, especially when none really have the membership to support smaller communities yet

Which server do you want to use is like asking "Do you want Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo for email?" it really isn't that big of a deal, but maybe people these days have a hard time doing that too...

Maybe better TLDR of how it works will help people realise it doesn't matter too much which instance they pick

I've gone on this diatribe about PIxelfed's onboarding process, where they have a website that says "This page will help find the perfect server for you" and then is designed to present as little meaningful information about each server as possible. Looking at join-lemmy.org, it's marginally better. "You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which you choose" 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn't matter why make the choice?

Here's a question I have, because I'm honestly not sure: Let's say most of the communities I'm personally interested in are on example.lol. But my account is on sh.itjust.works. How much am I burdening sh.itjust.works by mostly reading and posting to example.lol? Would I be decreasing people's operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?

I am very new here, and not as passionate about the fediverse as some of you are (like your average redditor most likely).

Reading the comments here I think that the fact that you notice decentralization as a user can be a problem for many but offering simple instance lists, community lists in the UI can mitigate that and make it more a feature than a nuisance (for those that have trouble navigating it).

On desktop, I don't mind switching servers with different URLs, especially since I can read them all with the same proton UI. However, on mobile (I spend more time on social media via mobile than desktop, I imagine most people do these days) using the Jerboa app I cannot figure out how to "visit" another server. I can't enter the URL, I cannot click on the URL, I cannot search for @URL and get a list of the communities hosted on it..

I am sure there is documentation somewhere explaining how I achieve this, but I should not have to look for that just to acces different instances. I use lemmy on breaks mostly and as I said, am not passionate enough about social media to read manpages for it.. I imagine some will think "then we don't need people like you here", but in the end if close-to mainstream user adoption is a goal, you kind of will need people who just want to look at cats and discover communities as well, and making jumping between instances and finding communities is an important part of making that happen.

Edit: I do not think having an official sign up is a solutiom btw, I think different servers are neat, and I most likely will sign up to another I am more in line with when I know which are available. It is neat to choose a home server, but it should be seemless to find others. There is no need to obfuscate servers and pretend everything is centralized, but having easy access to a centralized list of servers and communities built into the UI seems like a must for me.

I don't think these people actually want to leave reddit. They are only interested in farming karma by complaining about it,

You can't do anything because these excuses are window dressing and not the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that 99% of people are incredibly unwilling to change their habits or spend five minutes to wrap their heads around how things work. If the question of which server to join is too much, this kind of space isn't for you.

No, having a full time job or a family is not an excuse to not learn how computers or the internet or networks in general work. You've had a lifetime to learn and are willfully ignorant. If you just give up and run away the moment you have to apply two braincells to understand a new concept, your cognition is fucked.

Im personally fine with basic competence and tech literacy to be a natural gate keeping the unwashed morons out. Lemmy is growing at a fine pace without catering to the lowest common denominators.

feels like old reddit

They obviously haven't visited https://old.lemmy.world/

I think people who claim that the UI/UX is fine are missing the point. It is fine to you, but it is not fine to whomever made the claim. And for every person that makes such claim, there are hundreds/thousands who think/feel the same but don't say anything.

Lemmy, as a community and as a project, should seriously listen more to the opinion of newcomers.

The one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.

I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won't do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don't need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don't need them here.

there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn't one of them

To the guy in here going "UX != UI!!!" Sure, but you can't design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. "Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience."

Lemmy has a "have our cake and eat it too" problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:

• Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and

• All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn't matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.

In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn't.

First there's the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the "join one server, access all of them" an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to "where do we draw that line?" is "somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there."

It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn't. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement "It's a different platform depending on who you are" on a monolithic service.

All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can't browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. 'Show me everything on lemmy.sports' or indeed 'show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.' You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren't a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn't.

If it does matter, we shouldn't have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

If it doesn't matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

I don't think you can have both at the same time.

I said it before and I'll say it again, Lemmy's (and Mastodon's) issue is that the users experience is influenced by the decentralization.

The server side needs to be a decentralized database stored on a bunch of servers with all content available from one website with an API so people can develop apps for it (or even alternative websites), but otherwise the decentralization should have zero impact on what content the users have access to. In other words, do like Reddit but instead of having a ton of servers owned by AWS hosting everything, have those servers be owned by anyone who wants to host part of the database.

So my understanding from reading this (and other threads on Lemmy) is that:

-A majority of Lemmy users would rather the userbase remained small (in comparison to corporate social media and even compared to Mastodon).

-And a small but vocal minority wants to grow Lemmy to the point of being at least one of the choices, if not the de facto preferred alternative, on the mind of most Redditors who are sick of Reddit.

Is that accurate?

edit: formatting