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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds thinking about onboarding. Perfect is the enemy of good.
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.
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.
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 @technology@beehaw.org. 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 @technology@beehaw.org - 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 "cdelsolar@news.ycombinator.com" or something like that, to show that you were posting from a different server.
You have an account on one server eg. foo@bar.com. People on example.com smallreddit will see you're posting from bar.com (ie. your username will look something like foo@bar.com). 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.
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 discussions, packaged into a module ("NYT article fetcher," or "Reddit discussion 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.