Eight days later: Kbin, Lemmy, the landed gentry, and the rise of “threadiverse”

There are some tweaks and modifications that can make the decentralized nature of these services still appear centralized.

Specific to lemmy adding the ability to categorize communities and sort by said categories (ala multireddits) would go a long way.

Additionally adding some type of search in the sidebar to find other like communities would help.

There’s already some bookmarked etc that will modify URLs to format them to your instance correctly. I would bet this gets committed to the core UI app at some point.

Making sign ups easier would go a long way too. Some of the drama with bigger instances defederating will help sort this out. I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s a proxies sign up service that will randomly put you on an instance once most of the above is sorted.

Finally, being able to transfer your account will be huge.

Keep in mind some of these services are brand new (ie: Kbin) And others are seeing very rapid growth that’s helping them mature quickly (ie: lemmy).

People are decentralizing because it gets damn expensive to run more than 100,000+ users (or so) on a single server that is owned by a hobbyist / part-time sysadmin.

By decentralizing, it becomes possible to run your own community of 10k to 100k people. Which is plenty large enough for most people's purposes. 100k active monthly users is going to be far larger than most subreddits.

Even large subreddits, like /r/hardware, only had ~10,000 monthly active users or so, if I remember the sidebar statistics. So you can run your own instance today on bog-standard servers using one of these OSS software packages.

In contrast, Federated systems like lenmy/mastodon are connected islands, each under some person or organisation’s control (and moderation).

Bitcoin is massively wasteful of energy due to its design, and hopelessly limited in terms of capacity and scalability. It puts itself beyond the reach of law enforcement and any requirement to conform to societal norms.

The Fediverse has challenges too, but the fundamental difference is it’s not trying to replace trust in people with an algorithm.

AndStatus and Twidere.

It was seamless, the only way you could tell something was federated was by looking at the domain name on the user handle, other than this there was little to no difference.

(This could be a plausible use of blockchain).

If they would incorporate that, then you could have the same identity regardless of what decentralized server you were on.

Perhaps that would be a useful tool. Federated Centralization. Recreate the utility of FB/ Twitter / Google sign on without giving your data to tech conglomerates. You could even make it so that each site shares a unique sign in key so that you are the only person with the information of the main key and that would make it harder to trace back user info to the defederated central server system.

Users can subscribe to whatever forum they want as long as it supports the new RSS standard. They can engage with the forums in their aggregator of choice or on the forum site directly if they want.

i personally just made an account on all 3, and time will tell what i use most and what becomes like a default.

That actually reveals even more complexity: having to understand what federation is, researching and experimenting with clients, how to find different communities across the fediverse. Each added complexity cuts how many people would be willing to make the switch

My Twitter-using friends have complained that their feeds have become a ghost town and has lost most of its utility as a social network in the past year. Part of the reason why people were so upset at Reddit is because of justified fears that it's going down the exact same path. I have seen countless people myopically and unjustly banned from most major social media sites. How are these things anything other than a destruction of a social graph?

The thing is, this kind of vitriol isn't uncommon, and I've been trying to rack my brain trying to figure out what would cause such a reaction. Is it a misguided feeling of patronizing empathy for end-users? A distaste for the tech-enthusiast types that champion them? Or is it distasteful from a business POV since it is antithetical to walled gardens?

i had to google around a bit to figure out what you meant by that. do you mean "server A blocks server B, you run server C and want to federate with B but if you do then A will block you too"? if so, that's not "empowering people to destroy your social graph", indeed, from A's point of view it's the only way they can contain a potential infection by posts from B. but as an end user you could easily have accounts on both A and B, and a client that merged them, you just can't use your server C to join A and B into the same graph when A does not want to be connected to B.

What you're looking for are home automation communities, such as:

- https://lemmy.ml/c/homeautomation

- https://lemmy.ml/c/homeassistant

- https://lemmy.world/c/homeautomation

Regardless of which instance you specifically join, you can subscribe to all three of these communities to follow & participate in their discussions. Here's an instance browser to help you decide where you want to make your account: https://lemmyverse.net/

It generally doesn't matter which instance you sign up on, but here's a few guidelines if you just want maximum access with minimum hassle. This information isn't really particularly necessary, but it may help alleviate the choice paralysis if you happen to be anything like me:

- Don't sign up for Hexbear -- it's a non-federated instance, so accounts there can't browse outside content.

- Try to avoid joining the largest instances (5k+ users) -- large instances are more likely to be blocked by others for various reasons (e.g.: lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works are blocked by beehaw.org)

- Try to avoid joining instances which specifically advertise themselves as catering to contentious or risque content (e.g.: lemmynsfw.com, burggit.moe, lemmygrad.ml) -- pretty self-explanatory why admins tend to like blocking these, I think!

- Try to avoid joining small (<1k users) and/or joke instances -- if your home-instance goes down, your account & comments will disappear with it, so choose something that looks like it has some staying power. This will also help streamline your onboarding experience because bigger instances are generally more strongly connected to everything else in the threadiverse.

- Still stumped? I can happily recommend my home-instance: https://lemmy.sdf.org -- not too big, not too small, highly innocuous content, and a long history of hosting robust fediverse servers.

Other than modern encryption, NNTP is perfectly usable on hardware that’s multiple decades old: Basically any 32-bit system with memory in the single-digit megabytes can run a newsreader, even a graphical one. I suspect the same is true for ActivityPub. And while that can be true for web forums, it almost never is, and mostly for aesthetic reasons.