I don’t know much about how the fediverse thing works. Would it be theoretically possible to have something kind of like how torrents work, with some central list of all servers acting as the “tracker list”?:

- 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.

You don't have an identity on a torrent unless you join 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.

Torrents have magnet links, which don’t require servers at all.

That is untrue, you still need a server to facilitate discovery/passthrough. Peer-to-peer does not exist in the wider internet for most consumers.

> you still need a server to facilitate discovery/passthrough

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

I don't think pex/dht operate on 'well known' ports. in fact, I think most clients are configured to randomize the port they use on each startup.

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

Trackerless torrents are very old now, they use the DHT network to find peers. I believe it needs to be seeded when you first start a newly installed client, but that's completely transparent to the user.

This is not about an IPO or infinite user growth potential in the next quarter. If we want to build a better world, some people must be left behind.

If you leave too many people behind you aren't building a better world, you're building a walled garden.

Progress is not linear. Young communities should and do alienate low effort and disinterested parties from participating while allowing anyone sufficiently interested to participate. We will find out if federated communities work because people will try to make them work in good faith, and if the core idea is good, it will be made universally applicable. The digital soldiers that thanklessly represent the technological status quo will always concern troll anything that isn't made by one of four companies for being insufficiently popular. Their input, like all the clamors of old-guard clingers-on will wash away, and they will be left with the basement full of floppy drives they thought would last forever. And the world will continue to turn and normal people will en-masse use technology that was once dismissed as having "too much sign-up flow friction" or "cognitive load" by patagonia wearing matcha sippers: people that will fall out from the world's grace just as quickly as they entered it.

> If we want to build a better world, some people must be left behind.

This has to be parody.

> benefit from the product and gain an incentive

> 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.

> 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.

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.

For a more precise background* I don't believe a representative democracy, where we must abandon all power to someone else who we hepe will do the right thing is a model we should be pursuing. Polls are not a good thing per se, they're only better than the worse methods.

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.

Brilliant. This properly frames so much of what I have been seeing. I actually worked at a social media building their applications. When our business people spent so much time telling us to build things to show the user what we wanted to show them, I always thought how idiotic it was that we would pretend to know what our users want. It's a form of corporate narcissism. I left :)

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.

Approach it like evaluating dependencies, or maybe researching a political candidate. View a few different federated-social sites, with test accounts if needed. Rank what you like about them on a spreadsheet. Mark users or discussion threads you want to follow.

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.

> 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

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.

If the philosophy is the point, it's a dead platform. Utopian ideals are fine, if that's your thing. Shaming people who don't share them is just rude. I don't see how you can compare the platform to the democratic process and not expect the same warts you see in democracies. A few people care a lot, some people care a bit, most people barely care at all. Grandstanding will never change that.

I've saia it in a sibling post, but I don't believe our political systems are perfect models of democracy but are closer to benevolent dictatorships. It's comfortable, but that's not xhat the fediverse is about. There are plenty of centralized platforms with exactly the same problems as reddit, the fediverse is about building something else.

If there are no successful, extant examples, then I don't think it's a good basis for anything. As I said, it's a Utopian ideal. That's fine, but it's not practical (and it's not trying to be).

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.

You need to define what "successful" means, because I feel we don't have the same definition. To me, being able to control the medium and communicate with the people I'm interested in is already a success. The fediverse is home to millions of people and is open for anyone to join. It's not a product, because "products" suck; it's a system that involves people and is under constant evolution.

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.

This is a horrible way to get the mass market. It seems like a perfect way to recreate the issues with desktop Linux

There is no mass market solution to both the problems Reddit solves and the ones Lemmy solves. Anything like Reddit which is optimized for easy access and broad engagement will draw a lot of non-contributing users, a lot of spammers, trolls, etc., is unwieldy to run, and will need to suck eventually when it comes time to monetize the network effects. Anything like Lemmy, which can be self-supported and necessarily allows people to run and manage their own fiefdoms in ways that are manageable for them, means there is an added layer of complexity which inhibits easy access and broad engagement. To the extent Lemmy can be made easier to navigate, sign up for, or create communities with, it should be. No one should have to recompile a Lemmy kernel or anything, not that it's anything like that. Neither should anyone expect or even want it to be Reddit, which just deferred figuring out how to sustain itself during a prolonged giveaway of utility before its inevitable enshitification.

That's assuming the goal is to get to 'mass market'.

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

In that case, why even bring up Lemmy as a Reddit alternative? It just serves to attract people who won’t be good users and waste their time

Lemmy has the same functionality, and allows people to both control their own conditions and talk to anyone. That's the reason this whole ruckus is happening. Centralized alternatives don't have that. I don't know who said lemmy is an alternative to reddit, because just like mastodon/twitter, it's not. Or rather, not so simple.

Some people like desktop Linux and don't care whether it's for the masses or not.

Early internet was good because there were technical barriers to entry. Then the floodgates opened.

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.

If all you care about is the philosophy, then you're going to fail. Most people only care about the end product, the end experience. And unfortunately you still need those people (to some extent) since these sorts of things require some kind of critical mass to be successful.

Fail at what exactly ? What are your criterias for success ? If it's something like eternal growth ana scalability, I would consider that a failure. My criteria is if everyone has access to the people they care about, in conditions they control. Commercial success is not for me.

> 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.

Sadly most people are the herd and the herd wants to be force-fed. All the better, I prefer smaller more engaged communities anyway. Diamond in the rough, lucky are the few, etc.