Lemmy seems like the right alternative but it needs work. The docs to setup your own server are all wrong and outdated (docker). I just went through it a day ago and I had to fix half of what it said in order to get it working correctly. (Yes I will do a pull-req to improve this once I am satisfied with my setup)

The other issue with federation is picking an instance. There needs to be more initial connection between instances. By this I mean it needs to be much easier to subscribe to a community on another instance. Right now you have to copy paste parts of the URL into your instances url.

Some sort of shared authentication across the fediverse that identified your instance would enable something like this.

You need users to have a social network and users, at most, want to enter an email address and password to get an account. And then they want it to work normally.

I you want a site for hackers, you can just write it in your own lisp dialect (; but if you want a social network you have to make it much, much easier. Not sure the decentralizers understand just how critical that is.

Also users, aside from a few loud ones, really do want at least some minimal moderation.

They don't understand or at least the current implementation states as much.

You have to first pick a server to join, then join that server. Once in, you're typically presented with local server content only. To see federated content, you have to select "All". Same story with looking at communities. Local first, All by selection only.

You then have problems with the style of Federation. If I create a community one Lemmy instance called tech then you create the tech community on another, we now have two tech communities separate from each other. Given your default community view is local, this presents a problem. You've already got a lemmy.ml technology community along with a beehaw.org technology community. It can quickly spiral into a mess of unintentional duplication.

Absolutely. It's why I haven't really cared about Mastodon. I'm an engineer and it absolutely seems like a correct approach to me but it's never going to appeal to the general public outside of engineering-adjacent crowds.

Exactly, barrier to entry is way high at the moment.

My Lemmy instance just went dark and tosses 404 errors about JSON responses. Its also now removed from the join-lemmy.org site and some of the trackers.

And to be honest I have no idea if it will come back....I guess this is the risk of choosing instances.

I considered buying a domain and setting up my own instance..If for no other reason than to be in control of the account I use for this reason (of course the domain i priced has been picked up since it seems the migration is happening and i missed the boat.)

> it needs to be much easier to subscribe to a community on another instance. Right now you have to copy paste parts of the URL into your instances url.

On my instance at least, you can click Communities and just browse the list and subscribe to whichever you want.