To me, it was the astounding amount of interactivity between the community.
At first I thought this was temporarily caused by the whole migration from the R site. But, just out of curiosity, I signed up to Mastodon and have enjoyed myself just as much as here.
Most of the Lemmy post’s / Mastodon toots have almost as much or more comments / boosts than upvotes or favorites. It feels so organic and makes me realize how much these huge companies employ technics to pretty much force to interact the way they see fit.
It reminds me of that good old saying “you are not immune to propaganda”, well I guess neither I nor anyone is immune to psychological tricks either.
P.S. I also love the fact that since there isn’t pretty much any money involved, most opinions and interactions are genuine. Like, who is gonna pay this dude to advertise a book through BookWyrm? That increases immensely the odds that said person is being honest with their opinion of that book. It’s amazing.
I think the concept of the Fediverse working that well is still sureal. It is so fascinating how a entirely community driven project works better then what some comapanys do. This is what Social Media should be. A place by Humans for Humans owned by everyone. Not some Company that just wants to make money.
The two biggest surprises I’ve had so far:
- Lack of federated login / single sign on. It seems bizarre in a land of federated instances to not have the identity provider decoupled (or even truly decentralized). Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. “Backed up” your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn’t exist today. And even if it were added, how do you validate?
I hate to even suggest it just because of how much of a buzzword it has become. But blockchain feels like a possible answer to the identity problem. It would couple one’s identity to the network as opposed to the instance.
That’s not to say that instance-level identities shouldn’t be allowed as well; but it would be nice to have the option. Right now one basically needs to sign up for separate accounts on as many instances as possible to prevent bad actors from posing as them. A universal ID would solve that.
- Lack of historical data. Are you the first subscriber to !bobswidgets@feder.icio.us through lemmy.world? Doesn’t matter if the original community had fiftyleven posts. You only get to see any created after you subscribe?
I think you’re justified to be wary of the buzzwordiness of Blockchain though. For the 2 days I spent learning about what all this is before I signed up, every time I heard “de-centralized” I kept asking myself, “How sure am I that this isn’t some weirdly elaborate crypto scam?”
Bonus fear: I was also concerned for a while that this was just going to be a refuge for hate groups who have been kicked off of major platforms. I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.
Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. “Backed up” your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn’t exist today. And even if it were added, how do you validate?
Normally, you deal with something like wanting to authenticate to many different entities via use of a public key. I suppose one could hypothetically have a mechanism to register a PGP or SSH pubkey with the network.
But I don’t know how easy it would be for most users to handle the key management.
These are both definitely pain points. The good news is that the second issue can be dealt with manually, even though it’s annoying: you can copy and paste post links from the community on the server you’re browsing, throw it into the search form, and the remote post will get pulled in. This is a common convention in almost all fediverse platforms.
It seems bizarre in a land of federated instances to not have the identity provider decoupled (or even truly decentralized). Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. “Backed up” your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn’t exist today.
Just linking a suggestion someone made in the same spirit:
https://beehaw.org/post/605834
They propose / wish for Decentralized Identities.
There’s also an open issue on GitHub Moving user profile to a new instance #1985.
I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple days, and I agree. There’s even the problem of duplicate "subs* popping up on other instances. Federation as it currently is seems to be something that works a lot better with a Twitter alternative than a Reddit one. There’s probably some tweaks that can be done to make it a more unified experience. I have some ideas, but I don’t think they’d work.
These are my suggestions, and I’m sure there’s a reason why they haven’t been done.
- Break down the Lemmy/Kbin Federation further. Each sub is it’s own instance, this makes it cheaper for people to run their own instances, instead of running a full blown site with several subs. This will also allow for replacements for subs to be created easily, and removes the chance for another Spez to show up.
- Make the user account an instance. Each individual post or comment is made to the user profile/instance, but is copied or reflected to the sub it is posted to. If the user account is deleted, a signal is sent to each server that the user has deleted their profile, and to remove each comment/post with the users unique ID.
- Make each sub lowercase and remove all white space, so that individual “comic” instances, or “funny” instances appear together by default.
But you can also have multiple subs on reddit for the same topic. e.g. AI and ArtificialIntelligence. People choose the best one and they either stand or fall based on merit. Things will settle down.
I completely disagree with that it works better for mastodon than lemmy. I think it was confusing as hell on mastodon, but makes perfectly good sense on lemmy.
Communities are a major advantage, because they allow people without technical knowhow and capital, to create and moderate places of common discussion. This was an issue with mastodon because instances was the only way to divide users into topics, which prevented non tech savvy people from making these categories. Having communities, separates the concern of hosting from the concern of moderating.
Furthermore, I don’t understand the problem people have with “duplicate” instances. What is the issue with subscribing to more than one? It’s not like you have a limited number of subscriptions. There are already a couple threads on the issue tracker on GitHub, about implementing “multi communities” and so on, it has too many downfalls in my opinion.
to me, it was surprising just how easy the fediverse was to understand if i stopped trying to think about it how i was taught to think by centralized platforms.
at first, i was really hesitant to migrate. i was confused by kbin, lemmy, mastodon, and especially the fediverse. i didn’t think i could ever understand it. i wasn’t confident in it. but, after a few hours of exploring, interacting, watching people talk about it and reading explanations, it clicked into place and suddenly made sense, a whole lotta sense. now, i am actually teaching others about what the fediverse is with little to no trouble and helping them migrate to kbin from reddit, and thats amazing. having tons of fun here! 👍
Yeah I’m on kbin and cooudfare was protecting the servers from crashing, but it also prevented federation from working properly. It’s working again this morning and it’s like night and day how much more activity there is!
BookWyrm. I’d searched intensively for a replacement for GoodReads, and been stuck with LibraryThing despite it’s extreme user-hostility (by which I mean the opposite of user-friendliness, not that the people there were hostile). BookWyrm was what I was looking for all along!
Bookwyrm is so good! It’s so simple, and just works. Somehow, it’s one of those examples of the open source alternative actually being way less clunky and cluttered than the proprietary thing.
I’ve been really enjoying bookwyrm as well, it has just the things that I want, and it’s clean and simple, that it makes it trivially easy to share with people I talk with on mastodon as well is a plus :)
We need polished mobile apps to really push the fediverse to the masses. It has been a great experience so far though and I think I’ll stay a while.
I like the new location, due to the principle of federation itself. It’s interesting to see how theaet many smaller communities will evolve, especially those of identical interests on different instances. There’s an inherent messiness to the situation as we’re mostly humans, so all the “baggage” I wish would stay on Reddit is someone else’s entire enjoyment here…
I’ve also been surprised how many people are eagerly becoming moderators – there are many communities I’d like to see, but am not convinced I could even moderate effectively, so it’s impressive.
That said, I worry some of the excitement is due to novelty and self-convincing, like when people say “This is fun, right?” But maybe I’m just a bit too skeptical. Regardless, I’m enjoying the ride thusfar, and love seeing people’s effort on instances, communities, apps be celebrated. It helps convince me that humans do enjoy cooperative success.
I’ve also been surprised how many people are eagerly becoming moderators – there are many communities I’d like to see, but am not convinced I could even moderate effectively, so it’s impressive.
That’s basically the same as on reddit, everything there also just got started by people wanting to see a topic discussed, I wouldn’t worry too much, because at least in my experience, as the sub/magazine grows usually you find people that you trust that you can deputize into helping you moderate :)
