For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?
Once the fediverse gains significant traction there will be a huge coordinated media smear campaign to associate it with extremism, CP, violent crime, terrorism etc… The “won’t anyone think of the children” attack will be leveraged to ““regulate”” the fediverse (probably by legacy social media like Meta alongside the security state), aka transform it into regular old centrally controlled social media. Upload filters, encryption back doors, know your customer laws etc… Non-regulated decentralized social media will be attempted to be made illegal, not sure if it will succeed.
So yeah eventually any true decentralized social media will have to move completely into the “darknet”.
defederation. Set up my own instance to choose myself on who I want to defederate with
For me, aside from picking initially between kbin and Lemmy and then picking an instance (and the whole concept of instances), it was not having an algorithmically created feed. It took a bit to wrap my mind around since all of the social media apps and sites I was used to (and still use) provides this.
I was confronted with building my own feed by topic of interest (aka community or magazine) or else.face a firehose of all content from all local or federated instances. I mean, I did it, so it wasn’t that big a barrier, but it still required effort and conscious decision making on my part just to set up the thing to be usable. It’s probably one of the reasons why I don’t use Mastodon that much, because it’s easier to join/subscribe to topics in kbin and Lemmy (at least in my experience). Mastodon seems to be for following individuals and organizations, and that’s even more work (for me).
One way to deal with this issue in Mastodon is to follow hashtags instead. Personally, it is also not for me, but it is still better than following individuals.
Controversial and probably unpopular opinion:
- the biggest hurdle the fediverse faces is that it’s not run by a business with monetary incentives to make it more popular and doesn’t have any marketing / market research / product managers focused on gaining users.
I’m someone who hates advertising with a burning and seething passion, and I’m no lover of capitalism, but from a systemic standpoint there’s a reason most open source projects burn out and go nowhere, and for-profit businesses have a higher chance of survival, because there’s direct incentives (you know money/food) to keep making commercial software and increasing it’s user base, but there isn’t for hobbyist and open source software. Especially in the case of a social network that is only as valuable as the content and users on it, this might be a long term systemic issue.
most open source projects burn out and go nowhere, and for-profit businesses have a higher chance of survival
You know like 50% of new businesses fail within 5 years, right? I don’t have stats on open source projects, but it seems to me those are more likely to fail because they’re run by one person who loses interest than because they don’t have a profit motive.
You know like 50% of new businesses fail within 5 years, right?
Yes, that is a remarkably low failure rate. 99.9% of open source projects sit unused and abandoned after 5 years.
those are more likely to fail because they’re run by one person who loses interest than because they don’t have a profit motive.
They’re run by one person because they don’t have a profit motive, so they don’t need to hire QA, market research etc. etc. All the parts of a software company that help to keep continuously developing their software and make sure users are happy.
Dude, yes, they’re run by one person because it’s a hobby. This is like saying 99.9% of stories don’t get published because there was no profit motive. There usually isn’t when it starts, just a drive to create or fill a perceived void, or even just practice. I write damn near every day with zero profit motive.
Linux wasn’t started with a profit motive. None of the open source BSDs were either. As far as I can tell, they’re still not particularly profit motivated. Neither are a lot of other open source projects that have lasted ages. Where’s the profit motive behind Bash? It’s been around for 34 years.
An inability to pay bills can stop a person from working on a project, but at the end of the day it’s usually not profit that keeps an open source project alive. It’s popularity and passion.
- Onboarding
- It lacks the critical mass to accumulate more users
- Account migration / excessive defederation
Onboarding. The fact that you have to choose an instance to join while creating an account is essentially forcing people to make a decision for which, unless they’ve done some reading, they’ll have no idea of the implications. It’s such a weird concept for new users - they have to know about a thing before they’ve had experience with a thing.
Even if it doesn’t really matter which instance you begin with, the experience will be different, and there’s a sense of “pressure” at the point of signup, which doesn’t exist outside of the Fediverse.
Even if it doesn’t really matter which instance you begin with, the experience will be different, and there’s a sense of “pressure” at the point of signup, which doesn’t exist outside of the Fediverse.
Would you not say it’s more like it doesn’t exist to the same degree? Not that that diminishes your point, mind, only that in my experience online I’ve found similar when it comes to other online communities, say when deciding different Discord servers to join and some requiring waiting, reacting to be able to chat, or more rarely, have 2 factor authentication enabled of all things.
Before that, and more a sign of my age I guess, it would have been different forums, different chat rooms, and the like. Each similar in basic functionalities, but different experiences and a different sense of “pressure” to each.
I don’t think it’s the same with Discord because you already know which server you want to join, even if there are hurdles.
With federated instances you are told they all do the same thing and that it doesn’t matter, but in the same breath you’re told there’s still criteria to consider (number of users, location, some have a main theme etc.)
I know it’s old, but MMO servers used to have this kind of criteria.
You would just a server next to you, speaking a language you did, with a reasonable amount of users
Extremist political propaganda from instances like Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and Exploding Heads.
I won’t recommend it to anyone in it’s current state.
The biggest issues for me are:
- No centralisation means there’s no canonical single source of truth.
- Account migration.
- Implementation compatibility.
No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set–and only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.
Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.
Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).
netsplits/defederation.
You can’t just tell someone to register for any server, and they will be able to see everything. So they then have to choose a server, which takes effort, and can cause analysis paralysis.
Maybe that is exactly what we need to do, to spare them from the indecision. Recommend them to a specific instance to sign up and follow you (if in doubt, the instance we use). I suppose we can mention there are lots of choices, and those who are inclined that way will want to explore other servers, many are not, and for them pointing them at a server may be best.
I’m just thinking that trying to say there are lots of networks, each with lots of servers etc, may be the problem.
Alternatively, should ask them some questions like do they want to post short format or long text format, and take into account a specific interest they have, and then we still recommend a server instance to them to join.
So for fellow ham radio operators, I just pointed them all to the ham radio Mastodon instance and said sign up there.
We can compose a list of instances with sane blocklists for each software and audit from time to time.
https://fediseer.com/ can be used for something like that.
Yeah, but then the blocklists themselves become a centralized feature. I’m not saying “don’t block the fascists”, just that it’s going to be hard to maintain a blocklist.
I can totally see the Fediverse going the way of email, as in you need a reasonably large amount of capital to maintain a well-respected, not defederated-from server.
By ‘sane blocklists’ I meant small and auditable blocklists actually. There are instances like programming.dev, lemmy on sdf and the instance I’m on that don’t preemptively defederate from other instances. That’s what I meant.
I mean that Lemmy and the Fediverse is not big enough for Russian troll farms and US ad agencies to start up massive numbers of instances and drown us in bullshit, like with email. If it goes that way, blocklists will sadly not be enough.
The platforms copied the design of centralized services without making enough adjustments to accommodate the different UX that a decentralized federated system brings. Some things that I think should be standard that currently aren’t:
- I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
- I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
- PeerTube has a “remote subscribe” option where you fill in a little box with your @username@domain and it’ll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it’d be great.
- Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other’s hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you’re looking up is most commonly used.
- Links to known Fediverse instances should open on your instance where you can interact with it rather than taking you to their instance where you can’t.
Implement these and the experience would be much better.
The strange aversion to moderation by means of defederation.
