I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user, then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the subs I like are done with their blackout.

Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s) instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise inhibit adoption of Lemmy.

It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").

Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.

Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding federation is almost comical. Apparently when major private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating locally or de-federating from problem instances (whether temporarily, to deal with a flashpoint problem, or permanently in the case of problem servers), suddenly it's a huge problem and an indication of "drama".

I clicked, excited. I closed the tab when it required me to select a server. I don't want to read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera.

This is a real and recurring hurdle to the adoption of these technologies.

Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd.

So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?

Federation might run 100x better if instances were suggested based on geographic proximity rather than semantics, a concept which makes intuitive sense to people. 'Pick from a random and inconsistent list of servers in no particular order' is like demanding that people who are considering taking a holiday decide where to eat lunch after they arrive before they buy the plane ticket.

I'm not. Absolutely the onboarding experience can be improved.

The problem is you're losing the plot, here.

The original commenter complained about having to "read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera."

But you don't have to do that if you don't want to. If you're already willing to blindly join Reddit, you can blindly join mastodon.social.

And the app is already now driving people to do that if they really don't care (which is what the OP claims).

So this is already being improved (and yes, can absolutely be improved further).

Forced choices drive away users. People don't like making decisions without context because they feel like scams. That's why uptake is slow almost a decade into federation. The UX model is bad.

Ah, cool, so you just wanna complain. Got it. Carry on!

.world is having technical issues. (I could sign up. But first login spawns an infinite spinny. The only reason I know that's one of the larger servers is because of this thread.)

I'm doing it. But it's tedious, and the hacker in me sees an opening for a competitor to scoop out the 90% of users who don't care about federation, they just want it to work.

> you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier

You really don't see the barrier?

It will end up like Reddit. But right now it isn't, and that's good enough to make a play for the users. Given a choice between that and choosing a server, signing up, finding its log-in unresponsive, looking for another server, signing up... (I haven't gotten further than this) who do you think wins?

By the way, we agree. I want a federated system to work. But simple sign-up fuck-ups, where even someone who's curious for curiosity's sake has to spend half an hour figuring out which servers even work at the moment,

I think that you're right in that the sign up UX is not great - there are also serious performance concerns, and in many ways the platform isn't ready yet. But I don't think that's going to persist for too long. I think some kind of "I don't care" instance (probably lemmy.world) will emerge, and the UX will improve. Perhaps it won't be in time, though.

Power users' power is users. We've frequently seen the celebs-first gambit by new social media entrants, most notably Clubhouse, and while it can generate hype for a bit, it's far from a proven strategy. It's frustrating to watch a re-play of Mastodon's fumbles, particularly since this time the protest is actually semi-organized.

Blindly clicking through a ToS while chuckling that 'nobody reads that shit lol' is in fact a better user experience for almost everyone. If your approach were so great, there would be physical cities whose population consisted entirely of architects and engineers.

the analog to a digital federation in the physical world, is literally just that, an actual federation. People making choices about what community they participate in isn't technical, it's social. Everyone who lives in a democratic society does in fact participate in how their city is run and governed or understands how to move from one state to another.

You do not need to understand the technical details of federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them. This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet. We ask it from people in the real world, so we can do it online. Why are we pretending the online version of some 19th century company town is inevitable?

Not only is it infantilizing, it's wrong.

People create communities online all the time. Whether it's Facebook groups or subreddits or Discourse forums or Discord groups and on and on and on. That's literally how the internet has always worked.

Going back to the Reddit example, it's easy to browse Reddit for [whatever]; when a person decides to create and account, they become part of the u/* supercommunity, and from there can start posting/voting in the particular subreddits that interest them. The fediverse does this backwards, equivalent to making people choose a default subreddit as a condition of becoming a user. It forces people to pick a home community which will shape their whole experience of the fediverse and how they will be perceived by other members of the fediverse before they have a chance to explore the system in a noncommital way.

it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them

It takes time for people to figure out what communities they want to inhabit within a new protocol, which is why the perception of locking them into a single originating community is an antipattern. People don't necessarily want to be judged by their originating instance, because it reduces them to a one-dimensional caricature of themselves. You could join a general-purpose instance, but there are multiple general-purpose isntances, what makes one better that or differnt from another? There's no way to tell.

Critics of the fediverse model have been pointing out this rather obvious stumbling block since it was established, and fediverse stans just keep sticking their fingers in their ears going 'la la la can't hear you.'

This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet.

It has nothing to do wish consumption vs citizenship. You're demanding people tie themselves to a point of origin as a condition of existing in the fediverse, which is one of the worst aspects of meatspace. If you join a general server and then start participating in some niche topic (idk, fursuits), people in the niche instance are likely to write you off as a tourist. Conversely, if you decide to join a furry instance but then participate in discussions about sports, a lot of your interactions are going to consist of 'go away, furry weirdo'. You could create multiple acconts for your different interests, but now you have the headache of maintaining multiple accounts.

There just isn't a good reason to lock people into a particular instance in order to sign up. It's just reproducing nationality, a concept that many of us would like to dispense with altogether.

Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the inevitable abuses. Federation stans need to grasp the fact that nobody who is not a full time nerd cares about how federation works at the technical level, they just want a place to socialize with the assurance that they won't be overrun by assholes. All the Federation stans go into it the idea that 'you can just defederate' whereas non-technical users go into it with the idea that they don't want to get raided in the first place.

The existing model of federation is not working. Users don't want to know about the infrastructure any more than people going into a coffee shop want to looka t the architectural blueprints of the building, and federation is clearly unable to pre-empt raiding behavior automatically.

Neither does Reddit. Have you not heard of brigading?

When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical friends, their eyes glaze over and they are confused by the necessity to choose an instance and the inability to make any kind of meaningful comparison between them. This is the exact same reason that Mastodon has never really taken off.

That's quite understandable actually, the Lemmy UX sucks. Try showing them fedibb.ml instead. It's Lemmy under the hood, and federation works perfectly - but you'd never guess that!

Doesn't this also describe Reddit mods?

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697

If enough creators move over then the lurkers will follow. But attracting lurkers at this stage is pointless if there isn’t any content for them to look at.

Governance is up to individual instances/communities rather than one faceless megacorp.

It’s a feature not a bug.

So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can go wherever he wants. I doubt he’ll stick around at Reddit when the content stream disappears.

Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money.

Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump ship the second an actually competent company builds a centralized alternative that just works.

So no, I reject the premise.

People absolutely do care about governance. They care if they're getting spammed by crypto scammers or getting targeted by abusive trolls. They care if their political views are being censored or things they find offensive are being promoted.

The difference is, on a traditional, privately owned platform, the users have limited choice and no say, and they've gotten used to that as the status quo.

And if you're a user who really doesn't care, cool, just join mastodon.social or lemmy.ml and move on. Problem solved.

As for complaints about onboarding, the official Mastodon app already drives people to mastodon.social (much to the chagrin of some folks in the community), so I have no doubt those issues will smooth out with time.

If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server that's used by people I don't like. I expect it to facilitate my emails with anyone else, regardless of which mail server they use. And I want gmail to do some spam filtering for me, but I expect that I can see the filtered messages and show the filter what it missed or wrongly labeled as spam.

If we leave the federation up to the servers, we'll just get a "fragmentverse" of walled gardens instead of a single big one.

I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time. IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox

With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them as a prerequisite to interoperability is how you kill the network by suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator.

This problem is created by tying accounts to instances. Because then other instances, instead of banning the accounts they don't want from only their own instance, can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which is poison.

That's a huge issue. My identity should not be tied to anyone but me. This has to be one of the biggest things that scares (admittedly more knowledgeable than average) people off early when they're required to pick a server. Mastodon's "don't worry you can move servers later" is better but still not frictionless, and does not work unless your source server is still online.

Boom, you have just reinvented usenet.

The instance I use hasn't defederated them yet, but I've already had to block most of lemmy.world's communities from appearing in my feed.

Nah, just kidding, it's a good point. But it's a good starter server, and once people get used to the idea, I think they'll naturally gravitate to other servers.

Let developers create each "source" of content or comments, packaged into a module ("NYT article fetcher," or "Reddit comment fetcher"), and let me choose which modules to install. Then delegate the infrastructure for executing scrapers or curating feeds to a set of federated servers that I can opt into. Or better yet, execute the scrapers in a local sandbox on my own device, so that the NYT can't block me because my requests are my own. You could argue it's just another form of a web browser.

I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech.

We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a polished experience day one. It’s going to turn a lot of people off, but I’m not sure there’s anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech could be key to the people controlling the future of social media.

> I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @[email protected]. All from my Mastodon app/account.

So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world? Is there a difference?

And you can view the posts at @[email protected] - but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to post?

Well, you could, but Beehaw basically blocked Lemmy.world. But otherwise the metaphor holds true. If you make an account on some other instance, you can subscribe to communities on Beehaw, post on Beehaw, and reply to users on Beehaw posts. When doing so your username, instead of being e.g. "mahogany", changes to "mahagony@[LEMMYSERVER]". That's how you can tell who is a user of that particular server.

The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can interact with people if you know how to find their account, the address of which is formatted similarly to an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with don't have to have accounts on the same server to communicate with each other.

It's like if you opened up a reddit thread while logged into your hacker news account, and decided to respond to a comment in the reddit thread. Federation would give you that ability. Your username, in that thread, would be something like "[email protected]" or something like that, to show that you were posting from a different server.

You have an account on one server eg. [email protected]. People on example.com smallreddit will see you're posting from bar.com (ie. your username will look something like [email protected]). The bar.com server's UI may expose stuff from other servers to bar.com users, and the reverse.

Defederation means severing those visitation rights and other interop between two small twitters or two small reddits, something Mastodon servers use rather liberally.

In practice, what ends up happening is that at least Mastodon has hideous degrees of ideological conformity via defedding and general woke modding, and there's essentially standalone dissident "witches' covens" and an archipelago of servers whose maintainers tend to think different politics are de facto evil. I could hardly use the same account to see what progressives, gendercrits and various strands of the right are talking about the way I can on Twitter, for example, because of the defederation moats that have been erected.

And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!"

I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise.

I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better.

I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.

The fediverse (and decentralized social media in general) breaks the mold of extreme ease of use and therefore subverts the cultural expectations, thereby violating one of the ways a user would establish if the application is "good", and thereby it looks "bad".

It's like, technically X algorithm is a superior algo to use. But I can import Algo Joe's library that's 50 years old and already integrated into every language I know, so I'll do Joe.Sort().

Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I see even less evidence that the VC business model is going to do any better with anything else.

Selective low effort is what those professors exhibit. But their ideas are valuable and worth publicizing.

Twitter is an example of many low-effort scientists writing some good content.

Twitter is also the current textbook example of the problem with low-effort platforms that are controlled by capital. Like, do I even need to explain this to anyone? Are there still any Musk fanboys in the room who think he's playing 4d chess?

But while Twitter circles the drain and the world scrambles to figure out what to use instead, and Mastodon steps up as a competitor which cannot be seized and ruined by capital, ever, Reddit stands firm as the one true platform that got it right! Everyone gazes in awe at the one last hope for the capitalist internet, which seems to be doing just fine.

And Reddit looked over at Twitter, and then Reddit looked down like Rorschach, and said... "Hold my Over 8000 beers..."

Also, reddit’s value is exactly that you have very different demographics on each subreddit, and “hearing the voice” of people is the whole point.

The fediverse is in its early days. Nobody would argue that Reddit.com was "easy to use" in 2007.

As a matter of fact, there's already a Lemmy/Fediverse UX that works just the same as an old-school forum/BB; the whole federation facet is exposed as an extra feature on top of that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB We know that UX works, because it was quite popular even among novice users.

And instead of relying on servers to federate with each other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers that the client subscribes to.

Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away.

It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason or another until they're gone.

'Documentation? Just learn programming and it will be obvious.'

This is what old reddit did so well. You just open reddit.com and you see a dense wall of stories, along with vote count, number of comments on each story, and which subreddit that particular story came from.

All in ZERO clicks. No images or graphics at all, aside from little thumbnails you can easily ignore. Minimal, dense, and clutter-free.

I joined the former today and can't log in. (That's fine. Scaling difficulties are a champagne problem.)

But first I had to spend about half an hour reading comments here to identify lemmy.world, as well as confirm I wasn't joining e.g. the Nazi server. I still don't understand what power I'm giving the admins of that server. I started looking into another server to join, but after looking at more posts, I'm not seeing a discussion that's pulling me in right now.

Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.

Thing is I _still_ closed the tab and will likely forget about it. Turns out that thousands of people posting nothing but complaints about "REDDIT EVIL", isn't that interesting to read.

In terms of discovery, there is a centralised community browser of sorts... but you'll see it's got quite a way to go: https://browse.feddit.de

However, as someone willing to put the time in to learn something new I've found my efforts rewarded. It does take longer than 10 seconds to get used to Lemmy and the fediverse, but I'd say no longer than 15-20 minutes really. I enjoy being part of something new and I hope it lasts. Perhaps it won't hang on to many of the new users it has gained, but I expect this won't be the last time Reddit does something its users don't like and next time around more will stick, hopefully presenting a very good alternative.

Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse.

Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world

Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform.

No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github.

It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one?

These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point.

USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.

Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it.

Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when those values and decisions directly cause effects they follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.

- Servers choose what they want to host and what their personal bandwidth limit is

- A user visiting a specific subforum automatically downloads from whatever servers are currently available to serve it

Then you’d never have to manually choose a server.

Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.

You could just bruteforce IPv4 until you hit a peer that will give you a set of known peers.

most every client comes with a list of 'bootstrap peers' for dht though.

This has to be parody.

> An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.

I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the fediverse. The philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communications as a society. It implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community. Your egocentric, utilitarian, self-obsessed mindset is the complete opposite.

I can't be really surprised to see this on hn, but oh well.

Nothing about cleaner onboarding requires anyone to compromise principles. And nothing about a guiding philosophy requires you constantly evangelize. Let the merits of the system speak for itself.

> implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community

Then the sign-up page is a poll test. Democratic ambition strives to make participation easy. That doesn't mean the act of participating is easy. Just that we identify needless barriers and ideological tests as undemocratic. As a result, democracies--time and again--outcompete their centralized peers.

What I'm seeing is not competitive, and it is not democratic. It's closer to theological. I'm hopeful that someone will embrace these principles more productively so we have middle ground between Huffman-Musk and crypto/web3.

What happens here is that we have the occasion to take control of our community gatherings. How do you take control if you don't even know what you're talking about ? How can you discuss the form of society we're building if you don't want to discuss and be told how to think ?

Now, I understand that what I'm asking for is out of the norms, because we're not used to decide collectively and run our own lives, the entirety of our education and our lives happens with someone else taking decisions for us. It's comfortable, we don't need to think too much, especially when we agree with the decisions. Here is the occasion to do it differently. Why not do it ? And if picking an instance is too hard, why not pick a random one ? We want to have the best thing for us individually, but we want to be told what it is. We want to not be subjects to the whims of the owner of a platform, but we don't want to understand where we're setting foot and prefer a generic instance that will be for everyone. Hust lite reddit, but different. That's not building, that's consuming, and if you're only there to consume, do you really want a democracy ? It sounds like a benevolent dictatorship is better.

In short, I don't believe actual democracy can happen without understanding the situation.

So if I buy the philosophy (which I do), how do I (practically) get started? Let's say I want to use the internet to actually interact with people in my community. Is that even possible anymore? Do I just download Mastadon and start wandering the dark? I've wanted to penetrate this "intellectual" space but I just do not know how, and I am a software architect of 20 years.

Then when you want to participate, that's your starting point. Lots of people are lurk-centric, but you are already in the comments section here, so moving your posting probably will not be the issue so much as contextualizing it, which the different software and instances do help with.

A lot of "community" is in having some ritual, some events to show up for, or some events you organize yourself. It doesn't take a lot of those to fill up a calendar, but it definitionally needs to be non-zero.

This isn’t how actual democracies form. Solon and Cleisthenes didn’t gingerly nudge their ways towards democracy; that would have been a gift to Athens’ elite to stymie them. They put forward swooping reforms that changed who held power and brought everyone* into the tent at once. They told people why their ideas were better, because they were. (There is actually a great analogy here in the tribes. Tribes were assigned. You could later change them, but there wasn’t a giant before we start being useful we have to put on these hats process.)

Providing a simple path isn’t the same as taking away the difficult one. You can deal with a newbie pool from which one must “graduate” in some amount of time, for instance, thereby giving nobody a default bias advantage in users.

Systems compete. Ideas compete. I think the collective ideas the internet were founded on were strong. And not every one of them need be a cultural force—it’s fine for e-mail to be practical even if it’s in practice controlled by a few companies. But this actually has that opportunity to create a new culture, and it’s throwing it away by telling the curious it’s too good for them.

I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there. However, all of that will be capitalized by a nimble, forward-thinking, idealistic-yet-centralized model that gets rid of all the ideological cruft and polishes a real, useful, and engaging product.

The "product" mentality is the cancer that led us to where we are. We must get rid of it.

> I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there.

I totally agree with that. The control an admin has over an instance is still problematic, and someone shared something about confederated protocols (https://nexus.blacksky.network/zine/00000001/confederal-prot...) and that is an interesting way forward.

Lemmy existed before the Reddit exodus. It will exist when they all go back.

IMO, this will be the future of high quality interaction. Either small communities that are federated to prevent the same issue forums had, or places that charge a monthly fee for entry.

> Most people only care about the end product, the end experience.

Because that's what we keep telling them: don't think, let me take care of this, CEO knows better. That is how we arrive at this crooked situation where sharholders come first, business partners second, and users last.

USENET also had the "chose the wrong server" problem.

If I chose my ISP (e.g. Verizon) as my USENET entry point, then I would miss out on many newsgroups that Verizon didn't have. Or, Verizon had the newsgroup but had extremely short retention.

So, I paid $12.99/month for GigaNews to get all the newsgroups with months-to-years retention.

Lemmy/Mastodon/etc replicate the same federation issues as USENET because running servers costs money and different people have different thresholds of spending. This independence/freedom of the admin running the server the particular way they want is touted as a positive but it also has inherent disadvantages.

The contemporary situation of Beehaw instance defederating lemmy.world -- is replaying the same tradeoffs that USENET went through. (E.g. similar to an ISP's USENET service choosing not to carry alt.binaries.* or whatever.) Beehaw explains they have limited resources and can't handle the influx from lemmy.world. Yep. Very understandable.

It creates the possibility for a business model where subscribers pay for access to a big news spool and lots of groups. Just like USENet.

There will be some growing pains, but there will eventually be a continuum of "free" lemmy servers, for pay premium ones, and lemmy servers where the front end is only an app on your phone.

And they'll all see the same messages.

I think you should re-evaluate that assumption:

https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+instances+blocks+ga...

https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blocklists

https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blacklists

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/kw8jht/how_do_i_s...

Also, expand the ">Moderated servers" heading and scroll down through the instances they black:

https://mastodon.social/about#unavailable-content

Why do different Mastodon instances decide on not federating some of the other instances?!? It's because the owners pay money for running their particular server which makes them feel entitled to run it the way they want.

The "pick any server, it doesn't make any difference, you'll see _all_ messages anyway" -- is not realistic given that each fediverse node administrator can exercise their freedom to choose what messages their server accepts.

That is true, but most Mastodon apps make multi-accounting a breeze, and I imagine the Lemmy ecosystem will provide the same functionality.

It also helps that Lemmy is trying to court the userbase of Reddit, who are already a pseudo-anonymous lot and in my experience don't seem to have as much of an attachment to their old content as Twitter users, deleting their old posts and accounts on a regular basis.

Originally, Google was pure discovery. There was no Google content, just links. That's pure discovery. A standalone blog is pure content. Together, you have a social system.

Separating those is a step to freedom from oppressive service providers.

The nostr community right now mostly want to replace twitter rather than reddit, but in principle it would be possible.

Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.

How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?

IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a centralized alternative that worked when they were born.

I think there were many options at the time.

Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim.

Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks.

I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't have a sustainable differentiated product based on negatives. (as in, this is not the bad guy). You need to have something in the affirmative

1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper was an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their definitions of working weren't different from IRC's.

That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and it also didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table.

Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox run the desktop and Palm, Go and IBM do not control the smartphone market nor is my laptop by Grid Compass my microcomputer by MITS my spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold Constable.*

It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, Myspace, or LiveJournal.

Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here.

The real question here is why didn't it die like everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy survivors?

---

* If that cadence sounds familiar, I'm borrowing from Ogilvy's Confession of an advertising man bottom of page 61 (https://archive.org/details/confessionsofadv0000ogil_r2a4/pa...)

Separate problems: getting off the ground versus surviving.

IRC got off the ground because it didn't have centralized competition with a capability advantage. Why it persisted is a deeper story. Lemmy is still trying to get off the ground. It, unlike IRC, does have such competition. As such, the old playbook is obsolete.

I'm going to disagree. The old playbook is to empower users in unique ways that at the time feel almost forbidden and magical and to competently execute that.

You could claim all those avenues have been explored but I disagree there as well. The surrounding context and possibilities are always on the move so the underlying potential is always changing.

That's why say, YouTube, the 40th or so on-demand video company, which happened to launch when digital cameras and broadband internet were becoming widely used, was the first successful execution or why smartphones didn't take off until the rollout of 3G or, looking into the future, VR might finally take off at attempt 100 after some related thing changes.

Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.

It won the initial buy-in of us geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave it a rather solid base.

It’s a very personal type of communication. Real-time, immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate) compared to web forums, Reddit etc.

And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its heyday.

This is an interesting question. Wikipedia claims 230,000 users at peak times which is still quite a bit more than say, gopher. A 98% drop is real but you'll still see IRC occasionally for software purposes (like say, Debian)

Maybe it was a coalition of people there for different purposes and some of those groups have fallen away for different places.

For instance, people were doing dating and sextalk on irc back in the day. That application has been superceded by many other places.

It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely glacial pace with very uneven support across various networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts of channel management had to be done through a bot. Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord starts causing problems for its userbase.

The mega pun is that if you are hard working, intelligent and reasonable this is going to be incredibly hard for you. You are going to need help from someone who is non of those things.

Now that I've been on Mastodon and Lemmy, it makes more sense, but this is a HUGE barrier to adoption.

I would argue they are. Any of the servers will work fine. There needs to be a paradigm shift that only things that are centrally managed and have a profit motive are good.

Is this actually an issue?

If you're looking for a straight up reddit alternative in all its scope, I can see it being an issue, but if we simply want a better iteration, then isn't one more catered to technical users, perhaps be a good thing?

To me this feels similar to windows vs linux. The pains you describe in learning to use lemmy reminds me of windows users who complain about linux not being exactly like windows, UI wise.

But for users like me, after having un-learned windows and customized my linux experience, the result is just downright better from any angle. Yes, it was a time investment learning the ropes, but it was worth it.

Perhaps the modern approach is to stop trying to be like the most populist standard, and embrace platforms that are midway between the social giants and obscure niches.

Well, to be honest, that part does sound exactly like reddit.

But people fall on reddit by links to a public page somewhere, avoiding the empty page problem. After a short time on their site, I still don't know if I can link to a comment in Lemmy or if I can browse a community.

My current list of grievances:

- No standards of any kind on sharing the same identity, e.g. between Lemmy and Mastodon.

- No support for any distributed multi-master database (I'm currently trying to see if I can hack Lemmy to work with CockroachDB, but I'm probably going to give up).

OT but what pains did you experience with matrix / what would you have done differently? this'd make a good blog post/HN article at this moment imo.

The issue with Synapse is the same as I currently have with Lemmy - lack of HA. One particular machine goes down and the system is 100% unavailable. And most of my machines are hardware I own, located at homes (mine, parents, etc) in different countries, so they're slightly more prone to random power or uplink outages than AWS' us-east-1. Hobbyist-grade geo-distributed cluster, hah :)

I've solved this for my email (two mailhosts on different continents, Dovecot dsync replication for mailboxes) and my storage (Minio works, and I'm slowly experimenting with Tahoe-LAFS), but I haven't solved it for Matrix.

Dendrite supports distributed deployments and reportedly works with CockroachDB (albeit not officially supported). Not sure what Conduit supports (last time I've checked it was all about embedded databases like sqlite, rocksdb, sled and persy), but it has pluggable database backend architecture so when I'll finally decide I want to fix my stuff, I'd certainly check it out as well.

We’re also working on account portability (MSC4014) that would eventually support active/active at the matrix layer, but it’s not ready tet.

PostgreSQL replication is hard for me. I know how to set up "classic" replication, but automatic failover and recovery that can solve split-brain issues is, sadly, not something I've figured out. And if it's not the machine, but the network that goes down (which happens few times a year on consumer-grade connections), it's a problem that happens in practice. I have learned how to repair nodes by hand, but I don't want to do this.

So far, I've managed to avoid thinking much of it by using distributed databases (CockroachDB and Consul, in particular) that already have all the magic built-in, so I just have to be careful with the settings.

Maybe I just need to learn how to deal with PostgreSQL...

(if you have a third-party commercial PG extension with clustering, like EnterpriseDB or CitusDB, ask them, they'll tell you what they want you doing.)

there is no inherent clustering support in postgres. You can't scatter tables across servers/etc. It's not supported. Always one master server - if you need more storage you can use SAS/fibrechannel/etc of course but there is one postgres instance that's in charge.

All of the postgres replication idioms rely on that model: the WAL is reliable up to the point it's been received/verified. If you've faithfully played out the WAL throughout your existence, everyone's storage instance is at the exact same state and the only thing that matters is who's got the most recent timestamp from the host.

This also includes bringup strategies: if you have an atomically checksummed snapshot of the datasets (all storage, and pg_wal, at the same instant) then you can also spawn new nodes. ZFS can do that. And with an incremental copy-on-write you can replicate the base state, then replicate only the changes (which is much faster) and then fail over quickly. That's popular for other applications that don't have sophisticated ACID stuff.

Anyway short version is, I'd think about a simple blue-green system (or round-robin system) where you can set an environment flag, and blue frontend nodes can simply choose to direct traffic to green backend's pgbouncer or similar when they see that. Then you flip web traffic over. Then you shut down the blue pg instance, and stuff fails over gracefully. The "healthy", "progressing", and "migrated" states, if that makes sense. And there is always one healthy node, even if you need to bring it up from backups. Yes, you have to look whether the other side is still healthy but that is now a k8s/pod problem and not an app one.

If you can live with an instance in the US and one in Europe or similar, a simple blue/green failover is probably easiest.

I assume the Enterprise is on its way to resolve the issue diplomatically

It's not the best experience and it's not obvious or intuitive. A browser extension could simplify it substantially, at least. As could new features in lemmy itself, but you want to be careful about every lemmy instance consuming the content from every other one, as that won't scale easily for the average lemmy admin.

This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.

For the usual cases the normal UI should work fine.

It’s possible you’re seeing a bug, and it’s also possible that The System is Working.

I can tell you that the login link takes me to a form on Safari. When did tech people stop stating which browser they’re using and what quirky tools they have installed?

Here's a big list of servers (and their countries) sorted by MAU [1]. Note that the MAU data is out-of-date now that there's been a huge spike in the past few days.

[1] https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Other wise I just, use the search bar. I just tested it with the goal of finding a photography related community. Found it with the first search result from "photography". [1]

Another example, I wanted to find a risc-v related community, one simple search [2], boom, I found one [3]

[0] e.g.: https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

[1] https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/TopAll...

[2] https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/listi...

[3] https://lemmy.ml/c/riscv

Edit: Also, idk how I missed it, but the communities tab [0] also has a search, so there you go, I don't even know what else you'd want.

I’m hoping Lemmy has a cross posting function that will serve a similar use case. You start in a woodworking forum here and someone reveals the DIWhy forum to you organically. After six to twelve months you have your hands full.

Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity.

The most recent posts on the server I'm on:

    The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds
    Star Trek Discovery Canceled
    ‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early  Development at Paramount+
    Jack Crusher is how old?
    Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted.
    (spam - into the kill file that poster went)
    TOS Film marathon
    (crossposted trolling - more kill file material)
    Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery)
    (crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader)
    (crossposted trolling - even more kill file material)
    Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012)
    When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011)

Just text content.

edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.

So none of the things many people like. I loved usenet back int he 1990s, but the refusal to adapt to what users like to do is a large part of what killed it.

I feel like that's a nice unorthodox way of making it not feel so viscerally "new and empty", which is usually what leads to a kind of inexplicable ick factor most people have when evaluating whether or not to join a community.

Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement, unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does have a vested interest, even if they had no standing) bankrolling the whole thing.

I granted reddit the right to use my submitted content.

I never granted that to lemmy. Someone would sue, and they'd win.

Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term site:reddit.com` for lemmy?

Once you've picked a server and signed up, you can access any community on any other server by just searching for the community url on your instance. If you subscribe, your instance will begin federating that community to your instance.

It's pretty well described here - https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get...

So far for me, I've noticed about half of my communities are instance local, and half are federated. The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc.

available under server.tld/instances

So there will be several r/games, r/videos, r/gifs, [...] on the Fediverse? This seems like a big hassle, no? Is there a built in solution to aggregate these?

One could argue that on Reddit subreddits also competed against each other, but in reality most of the time, the subreddit with the most approachable name always won. r/godot is obviously going to be the main Godot subreddit, even if there is a r/godot4coolkidz "competing" with it.

Having an instance attached is great imo, because it doesn't allow name squatting, anyone can make a cars community on their own instance now and grow it.

For the fediverse the large instances will probably have a lot of the generic popular communities, but it also allows groups to host their own instance for their niche. I think this is awesome, because those small niche communities are the best, and finding them is actually fun.

For example there's now a programming.dev instance that has the best programmer humor community, there's also a good rust community there. But there's also now a lemmyrs.org instance picking up steam and may take over. I'm subscribed to both, there isn't a limit.

As for finding community, there's a bunch of ways. Sidebars of your current favorite communities may link out to others; the communities tab of your instance, with All selected, will show any community any other user of your instance has subscribed to. But a good place to start looking for communities is https://browse.feddit.de

Reddit set such a high bar for API pricing that I think there’s plenty of room to support both front-end and back-end development as well as hosting for lemmy servers. We just need to work out a revenue-sharing model that gives everyone a piece of the pie.

Also, in the 90s and early 00s, game servers cost money for many online FPS games - people hosted long running communities. Sometimes surviving via donation, sometimes just the benevolence of a person into the hobby with money. Community finds a way.

Now (here in Canada anyways), a few giant corporations, in theory, do all the growing for the legit market, and need to handle a lot of large-scale problems, like big central grow ops requiring 1.21jigawatts instead of a bunch of houses using a bit of extra hydro each, security, pilferage, all the big problems of scale. These are problems of growing at scale, though, not problems inherent to growing weed.

We didn't have the problems of scale as a community of indepdendent growers. We had other problems: cops, filtering the smell so as to be good neighbours, larger ops had to deal with moisture, the reputation brought on by low-rent gangster scumbags who rent houses, setup and then threaten the landlord. We had the problems of an unregulated market, and the quality of our product as well as knowing a dealer determined our success, but basically anyone with basic competence and the ability to keep their mouths shut (ie. the barest of street smarts) could make an okay living back then.

I would say that Silo/Fedi is going to have a similar dynamic, minus the cops. Moderation happens by volunteers because people want to have a voice in determining what rules make the most sense for the communities they participate in, it's a non-issue in either world. Smaller instances will have smaller moderation loads, larger instances will either get supported by their users (money, work, whichever) or break up, or whatever, but it's going to settle into a congenial equilibrium in which the community of operators and users all look out for each other. We have seen the alternative, and we do not care for it, so we are going to put in the effort.

The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the reddit itch...

It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.

Front end that works with feeds from multiple sources, like RSS, and permits comments, posts etc using SSO, with all interactions logged centrally in the SSO account (for later edits deletes etc).

Sound about right?

Because you me it seems like every provider in that list should be able to make a profit off the data and interactions... With users who want increased privacy able to pay for an SSO subscription to prevent the sale of data on that end.

And we already have all the parts to make it work...

Though it would look like /all what it would really be is more like an RSS reader aggregating multiple sources according to your preferences.

A Reddit alternative would naturally form in this ecosystem, with smaller alternative front ends abounding, and take dominance just as Reddit did, but unlike Reddit it would not be able to screw over sub mods etc.

Subs would be truly independent of the front end site, even if they are themselves also front end providers.

It's Distributed Reddit in a sense.... Though in my view it'd be best to make it content agnostic, so it can be adapted to other uses, specifically for a YouTube clone and such.

Really, there's a model where for most it's essentially a Facebook alternative that integrates into thousands of third party forums seemlessly...

If you do it, please keep in mind merging submissions and their comments, 6 separate entries for the same thing each with a couple of comments is a much worse experience than a single entry with a dozen comments. You can start by simply using the URL as a grouping key and try more sophisticated things later.

Essentially, Reddit Appollo and all the others are the front ends, with the subreddits being independent back ends (which would certainly also have their own front ends, even if restricted to their own sub).

Thus, the most popular front end would almost certainly just be a clone of old.reddit with the /all and /popular being made of the aggregate communities that front end has selected for default inclusion (with the most inclusive front end almost certainly "winning").

Tldr - SSO only matters for commenting/posting, lurkers would/could get literally the exact same experience as Reddit...

For example I might not have time to watch Twitch streams or Youtube videos from a creator over a couple months but I would still be able to go to a weekend event in my city or buy some some new merch that he announced. In general I would need to use another platform to not miss out (Twitter, Instagram).

If I controlled a client capable of aggregating all types of content I could decide to filter things out according to my immediate needs.

Content creators would own their own platform or choose a generic service provider and have freedom about what to make (video, image or text posts) and how to monetize.

The problems are who pays who, content discovery, and a decently sized userbase.

But yes, what you say is exactly the point of what I'm talking about.

Some sites would focus on being the universal front end for casual browsing while others would focus on niche purposes such as moderation or unique content types/presentations.

The data would be stored with the user by default in my model, ensuring they have control of their content, and offloading a bunch of the delivery work from the front end site (essentially every users SSO becomes the cdn for their chunk of the content).

It has some problems but it's really not much different than now except it's easy as pie for people to get eyeballs on their content (does mean monetization has some issues, as it does now).

Imrambling.....

I had the same thought, there must be many smart programmers with some good UX skills who must have done this (I hope)

So make of that what you will.

There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy.

https://lemmy.ca/c/[email protected]

Of course unlike an old-school forum, on Lemmy you can choose to federate with other instances that pick up your niche interest. But it need not be the default.

Say "no new posts here, go there." Enforce that for one day and see what happens.

Thats a horrible reason for users to go sign up on a completely new, unknown platform. Sounds less like a reason and more like a mandate.

Lemmy as a user interface is not well designed. It wasn't made to be read on a web browser in a monitor. It was made to be read on a small smartphone screen.

The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting

That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.

We want to avoid leaving folks like this: https://lemmy.world/post/97417

That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.

And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.

Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.

edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.

This type of design, jargon, style, is just anathema to a non-technical audience.

They don't wanted federated whatever, they just want reddit without the problems.

[0] https://lemmy.world/login

It does via websocket

A poster came onto sh.itjust.works claiming responsibility for that. They described the very minor trolling they used to achieve it. They say they work for Reddit and are personally invested in proving that federation is impossible.

So hey, it's the internet, assume everything in that is a lie, but it shows that there's emotional resonance in the idea of preventing this shift.

There are a lot of malcontents and radicals in the lemmy sphere and many of them are very angry about the Reddit exodus invading their space. It will be a few months before these things settle out.

It’s possible that google is overtrained, that it got too good at finding things in the structures of the Internet (see: PageRank), and that structure collapsed because we have Google for that now, so why bother? And then Google couldn’t tell the Pulp from the Real, and SEO became far too powerful. I doubt that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out.

In some of my hobbies, Co-ops are a powerful force for good (or at the very least, mediocrity++). These federations are just a fancy word for Co-op, IMO. If I can’t have Good, I’ll settle for mediocrity++ over mediocrity—-, which is the precipice we stand on with Reddit current events.

fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory.

what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders.

how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers.

(i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)

[reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this one more]

What are you describing? Email? The Web? PGP?

It took ONE MONTH of AOL users to be unleashed upon Usenet to obliterate it as a discussion platform for all time. First, it was loaded up with stupid, low-content posters. Then the spammers came to throw dirt on the casket.

I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if [email protected] matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?

Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.

This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.

That's kind of the point

Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative.

A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.

> Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.

For a technically inclined person on a largely technology focused forum, you sound an awful lot like a luddite.

There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it. That changed over time. The same will likely happen for these types of non-centralised services.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites.

> A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.

That might be true if you only ever want to read technical things with a technical audience in a technical forum. But that's not why Reddit is valuable or popular. Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch from water to beer because they don't meet the same needs.

Reddit is popular because I can read /r/netsec one day and /r/lawncare the next. Because when I wanted to learn to make my own coffee at home I knew I could just go to /r/espresso and get a 101. When my 3D printer broke, I knew I could go to /r/bambulab and ask for help. When the historic winter we just had in NorCal ripped shingles off my roof, I knew I could go to /r/roofing to ask for advice.

Sure, you might want to live in a world where you only talk to software engineers about software and maybe Lemmy is a good fit for that.

That wasn't my point, though.

No, it's an observation.

You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way.

Saying decentralisation will never catch on because it doesn't fit your description of accessibility is like saying someone won't be able to operate in society without knowing how to read or write cursive.

Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.

As people's mindsets change, as technology advances, so will how it's used. And you don't seem to be open to that idea. Hence the luddite comparison.

No, I'm not. I'm staying on the topic of the thread you're posting in: Reddit's future and where people may or may not migrate to. You're doing exactly what I accused the creators of Fediverse technologies are doing: fixating on the ideology and taking an opportunity to preach.

I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I understand it. It's not complex.

But it isn't a replacement for Reddit. I don't even think you're arguing that. I think you're trying to get me to debate some strawman. I never said the Fediverse has no value. I said it has no mainstream appeal so long as people prioritize the ideology of the technology over the use case.

> Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.

This is an argument that things _can_ change not that things _will_ change. Plenty of things never caught on. On that note, Diaspora existed as a widely available alternative to Digg when Digg died.

But people ended up on Reddit anyway.

> Centralization works... It's approachable for laypersons.

You are arguing that things will not change because it doesn't work in a very specific way. I'm replying to what you said. This isn't a straw man argument.

There doesn't need to be a direct replacement for Reddit. Things don't have to continue to work like that. Your assumption of what's difficult to do isn't an absolute. People have shown they're able to adopt new ideas, new ways of doing things.

> I'm talking in representation of luddites.

You're not giving enough credit to society. They're not cattle. They don't just sit in a field and chew cud.

Mindsets and ideologies change. How technology is used changes. Your insistence that there has to be a direct, fully equivalent replacement for Reddit to be successful is incorrect.

I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position. I don't think people are cattle. I think they are anything but: I think they have made a conscious decision about what they want and value.

What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information. And I think that products like Lemmy don't meet that requirement and so something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.

I'm not attempting to misrepresent you, that's just how you're coming across. You're effectively saying that people are either too lazy or not competent enough to use services that aren't packaged up and served directly to them. Hence the analogy.

> something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.

Maybe, but that's not the point. You're claiming that decentralised services won't see wide spread adoption because it doesn't conform to how things work on Reddit. My point is it's narrow minded to have that mindset.

That is explicitly not what I said. What I said was:

> What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information.

A replacement doesn't have to work how Reddit works. It just has to provide some of the same value.

The following are your words, not mine, although the emphasis is:

> > Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people.

> > I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0 before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.

It does for some people -- some people value the fact that it's decentralized over other needs -- but my point is the vast majority of people don't care as long as the information they need is there and accessible. The fact that it's decentralized is, in itself, not enough.

EDIT: And to be clear: I think the fact that it's decentralized doesn't preclude it from having those other properties that users value just that the developers of Fediverse applications don't seem to realize that they need to do something more than make it decentralized. That's the entire essence of my post.

And yet:

> > Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept

> > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. This is just the reality

> > Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch from water to beer because they don't meet the same needs.

And then there's this:

> > I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if [email protected] matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?

> > I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I understand it. It's not complex.

Which one is it? Complex or not? Do you need a user guide? No? Which one?

You're all over the place. Saying centralisation is required for mainstream adoption which means decentralisation isn't, but somehow decentralisation isn't the problem that the fediverse has?

One thing that I haven't pointed out in all of this is that signing up and using reddit might have been easy for you, but that isn't the case for every body. I'd wager for most visitors to reddit, whether or not they have registered an account, they simply consume the content there like they would a Facebook wall. Many users don't understand the concept of subreddits or fine tuning their account to their interests. They aren't getting the same value out of it that you place so highly on it.

Centralization does not necessarily make things user friendly. Nor does decentralisation make things less user friendly. You have implied both to be true and then contradicted yourself.

I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people involved in the development and advocacy of the products and their inability to listen to any feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve to meet them.

I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't see that happening, though.

If anyone here has been hyper fixated on technology it's you. I haven't been heralding the Fediverse. I haven't been waxing poetic about decentralisation. I've only been responding to the things you've said about how the centralised nature of Reddit is why it's successful and that decentralisation will never successful, which is something you said.

> > Federated services will never become mainstream.

As for this:

> I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people involved in the development and advocacy of the products and their inability to listen to any feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve to meet them.

It's not like those products can't evolve. The developers and communities behind these products can, and most likely will, do things to help with adoption of the services they've created. This isn't like the book of Genesis. Just like how some deity didn't create the earth in six days and then rested it's not like new features won't be added or different federated offerings won't appear.

> I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't see that happening, though.

Nah, that's okay. It's just a chat on a web forum. I imagine we'll both forget about it in a few days.

The _entire_ point of my first post was my finishing sentence:

> I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their ideologies.

Put more plainly: these services have been around for a decade (diaspora* was a viable alternative to Digg before Reddit) without meaningful adoption _or_ evolution in spite of that lack of adoption. I surmise it's because the folks developing them are more interested in the ideologies than building communities.

Obviously they can change. Obviously they can become a better fit with a bigger focus on UX. But they haven't in the last decade and I'm not seeing any indication they will this one, either.

While this was a bit before my time, I can definitely relate to spending hours or days to get something to work that I want to use. I think the difference is just that all the fediverse services don't really seem all that useful. If I open the frontpage of any "reddit alternative" right now, the top posts have a few hundred votes and a few dozen comments at most. There is simply too little activity here (that I care about) that would make it worth it for me to really get into it. I browsed reddit for entertainment and discussions and right now, none of the fediverse services I've looked at actually provide that.

Well unless you want to cover some only some very specific niches, yes it very much does.

It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users. This is an old story for many people who went through the Digg to Reddit migration.

Now people have had enough. Our communities are too important to leave in the hands of one company. It’s time for all the people who create 100% of the value on Reddit to have control over their own community’s future.

And yet in spite of this very thing happening, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted.

Diaspora* existed during the Digg implosion and where did people flock to? No, not the decentralized Fediverse, but to another centralized service. Because it meets their needs. Their needs from a product _aren't_ that it be decentralized. Their needs are that it is easily accessible, that information is easily indexed and searchable, that interacting with users is obvious and transparent, etc.

These are all needs that Fediverse products have not met well because they're too focused on their agenda and their ideology, not their product.

It's based on a metaphor of the body in a physical place, that doesn't really work online. As I mentioned in another comment, this is like offering to give someone a ticket to an exciting foreign city, but before they can get the ticket they have to choose where they're going to eat lunch when they arrive. This alienates people because they have no context for choosing between instances so forcing this choice on them as a condition of signing up is good way to maximize your bounce rate.

Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.

The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.

In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a substantial marketing opportunity to pick up market share, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted by the masses and will likely remain in a similar market place as Diaspora*.

You are forced to, every time you have to write the bit after the @ in an email address, though!

> The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.

I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content on the side of the various federated servers. Email defers to the client far more than these systems do. Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending solicited racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge proportion of Gmail's users complain about it? Yeah, then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because you're receiving racist newsletters. There aren't content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to user reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the servers don't try to proactively police or curate content that users want to read (they filter spam, sure).

(I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the fault of the federated model)

[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh moderator action on a lot of federated servers but that can (I assume—admittedly, I've not tried) get passed around via email without problems—my point is that the issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the server operators have. More fundamentally, this is connected to making the activity of these communities public on the Web by default—which I think is largely a mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become common for groups of people chatting about whatever to put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights all around the world.

Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data.

If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost?

If you're competing against algorithms fine tuned to make people pretty much addicted, do you really want to play the same game? And is this mindset not fueled by ideology as well?

Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity comes from interacting with others but it's also become a hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies, for trades, etc.

If I start a new hobby I don't need to go find the 10 year old abandoned page or the SEO manipulated AI generated summary. I just go to /r/hobby. New espresso machine? /r/espresso. I want to know what 3d printer to buy? /r/3dprinters. Damage to my roof? /r/roofing. I don't know how to do some maintenance on my house? /r/homeowners. I need to buy a new car but I don't know how to get a good deal? /r/askcarsales.

There's a lot more at play here than the stale "social media bad, algorithms manipulate society" take.

I hate facebook with a burning passion, but on “ultra niche groups” front it can actually be surprisingly good. What most big social media networks lack though is the very simple upvote-downvote mechanics, and proper comment trees. That enables reddit (and Hn also) to have truly great discussions from time to time. Facebook instead optimizes for rage by showing the shittiest possible take at front and no amount of explanation could de”platform” a low effort take under a news article for example.

While reddit is not immune to that, you will often find a great comment chain within the top 3 ones that calls out the stupid takes and actually has proper factual knowledge.

No what you are presenting is an argument for services that meet the needs of dumbest assumable users and centralization. It's the same unreflected argument as has been repeated over and over when it comes to Mastodon and it boils down to "everyone needs to be there or else it's a failure". Services like that obviously are fine too, but there is more than enough people that don't need or want that.

It speaks for a certain narrow mindedness that everything needs to be Silicon Valley's next big thing that will someday rock the stock market.

In reality Mastodon does not have the size of Twitter, and you might find it too difficult to use. However not everyone is that way, and it has over the last months proven to be a good alternative for users. It's potentially the same with Lemmy: It only needs to povide a cool alternative and enough users for meaningful interaction.

It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid. And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson. (not an excuse for a bad UI, but with new Reddit the bar is incredibly low there, and Lemmy seems fine)

> I find Lemmy frustrating to use

Well others don't, and that is fine. For me personally: not everyone needs to migrate to Lemmy (or another federated alternative), only the communities I care about. And the same can be true for other people as well.

Yes, I acknowledge that not every service needs to be a mega service that everyone flocks to. Yes, I acknowledge that multiple products can exist than when combined replace a prior, larger service. Yes, I acknowledge that Lemmy, Mastodon, Diaspora or whatever else you like is great and fine for you and I'm happy for you and that's OK.

No, I don't think any of these services will realistically replace Reddit and I think that if Reddit dies then Digg 3.0 will spring up in it's place.

> It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid.

I never said it was invalid. This isn't an attack on the technology. It's OK. You can calm down. It's my opinion that it isn't a drop-in replacement for Reddit and unlikely to see widespread adoption or prevent another Reddit from appearing.

It's like talking to Web3 zealots. I'm not attacking you, I promise.

> And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson.

It does if it wants to be as useful as Reddit is today and Digg was before it or achieve the same popularity. You argue that we don't need a single service to be popular and that's OK but I live in reality.

You're comparing apples and oranges. You acknowledge that Lemmy does not attempt to be everything Reddit is today. I'm suggesting that that leaves a gap and people are interested in that gap.

People have become accustumed to having a single location to visit to obtain a depth of knowledge on a wide breadth of topics. I don't think, and I think you acknowledge, that Lemmy attempts to fill that need. And thus something like Reddit 2.0/Digg 3.0 will always exist.

It was pretty painless, though I haven't tried actually posting anything yet.

there should be an aggregator for all of these instances: https://join-lemmy.org/instances

because my first instinct guess is, there's going to be huge overlap on submissions daily

there's only so much new news daily and a certain niche of people who read it/contribute

scattering them out to a bunch of obscure niche places probably doesn't help

there are even boring days on HackerNews. how many monthly active users does this site have roughly? 500k? 1m? way less?

I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy, since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks

Then, I stopped watching the walking dead