Hacker News Reader

Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

In another thread about this, someone mentioned Lemmy, a federated alternative to Reddit:

https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

Looks like an interesting approach.

The problem I see with lemmy, mastodon and similar services (anybody remember the also open source "Facebook killer" from like 10 years ago?) is that they are confusing: is it one service or a bunch of servers? Which server is the good one?

The average is lost on the first page, and you need her for these social based apps. You need the non tech savvy people to get communities like r/medicine.

Otherwise you get shat you see on IRC LiberaChat nowadays: the channels with people are mainly technical or technically related ones. ... which like, is good for people like us. But I come to HN for quality tech related discussions... I want a place for quality InstantPot talk, or quality ChildFree chat.

To argue your point, today on Lemmy.ml the owner advised users the server could not handle the load, and told users to register on other instances (https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true). This would mean multiple logins. There is no way to migrate or synchronise accounts. Federation is a cool idea but Lemmy's implementation is a terrible user experience.

Mastadon's is as well. Like it's cool that you can follow somebody if you already know their handle, but the discovery aspect of social media is at least half the point of it. Without some form of mechanism holding everything together, it's never going to be a great experience.

Someone should do a UI kind of like Emule: the main idea was the same: You fired your client and could connect to one of several servers, but end users didn't care, they just clicked on "connect" and the client will do whatever was necessary. Of course that client could be Web based, not necessary an application (although for mobile, applications are all the rage now)

I wish these federated systems would put a bit more effort into the user experience.

I mean, even though you’ve directly linked to the server list (instead of their even less straightforward front page), it’s still confusing. What is a new user supposed to do with this? It’s all incredibly opaque.

For people favouring to the old reddit interface more, I created another federated alternative: https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr (with an example instance at https://brutalinks.tech).

Sadly it received less publicity and mind share than lemmy, so not everything might be up to the expectations of the HN crowd.

link is broken

It works for me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com