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?

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* 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.