In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:
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Lemmy needs DIDs.
No, not dissociative identity disorder, Decentralized Identities.
The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it’s up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.
Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive “might not make it”, and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.
This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn’t a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.
*Banning the account could create the same issue.
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Communities need to federate too.
Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.
Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.
What do you think?
EDIT: There’s been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.
It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.
Personally I don’t know if Lemmy needs these to be successful. Depending on your viewpoint, Lemmy already is successful. Lemmy instances existed long before the current Reddit influx and seemed to be doing okay even if things were a bit slow.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site with the great benefit of federation allowing direct access and communication to other sites running in the fediverse. Identities and communities are specific to an instance because that instance is an independent community. In that frame of mind, having a different account on different instances and overlapping community topics between instances makes sense. Same way multiple forums have boards about the same topic and joining multiple forums meant multiple accounts. Federation just makes it easier to see across that gap.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site
I think you are right, and I think a major contributor to this is how Lemmy is communicated. We are inviting people to a concept when they expect to be invited to a place.
“Join Lemmy!” indicates Lemmy is the site. A site. One coherent system. Then “and pick a federated server” just seems like random frustration.
“Join <the instance I am using>! It’s on Lemmy so you can easily contribute to the communities on Beehaw, lemmy.ml, toupoli, … without creating separate accounts there.” is how I think we should go about it.
That sounds highly inconvenient from a end user experience if I’m honest. As a predominantly mobile user having to have multiple accounts set up in app and remembering to change to the right one for each instance will get old quickly.
The problem is that Lemmy is being mentioned in hackernews reddit and elsewhere as a potential alternative. Not as an alternative with all those caveats in framing but just so.
Communicating what it is even more boldly might be useful (I know it’s been done quite a lot in long self posts but that I’m not sure how much of that goes through)
I like the idea of aggregating communities. Especially if the modding tools are powerful enough. This could lead to communities being essentially curated lists of other communities. Which is great for new users to discover new communities without being overwhelmed by the unordered list of communities on the instance.
Another feature that I’d like to see is an equivalent to the mastodon’s lists, a way to aggregate communities for yourself. So that you could browse the content of communities sharing a same theme in a dedicated view.
Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.
On this point specifically, I think this idea is good. Multiple communities sharing a pool of aggregates that can moderators opt into. Great, I don’t know how feasible that is with ActivityPub, but I hope it can be worked out once the dust has settled.
However, “fragmentation” is neither a problem, nor do I feel exists as things currently stand. If different servers want to host communities around a similar topic, that’s not a bad thing. On Reddit, you had Gaming, Games, Truegaming, etc. They’re all about playing games, video or otherwise, yet if you look at them at all you’ll see they cater to almost completely different audiences. I don’t NOT want ultra dominate monolithic groups. I think if their existed a single “Technology” community then that would be a failure of the fediverse.
Right now is a period of extremes, so don’t evaluate communities too harshly. In the long run, I want to see dozens, maybe hundreds of small communities that maybe don’t get a huge amount of traffic, but are none the less, active and interesting.
These are good points. It sucks that as a PhD student in CS, I still don’t understand the workings of federation and other important Internet concepts. I hope someone smarter will work on this stuff, though.
You don’t need an upfront detailed understanding of everything to get started. Contributing to projects like this is a research project like any other.
That’s fair. I think I should invest my time in contributing to third-party apps, though. That’s a barrier to entry for newbies, I think, who want to be able to tap an app on their phone instead of going to a website. I believe Memmy uses Expo, which I might be able to contribute to.
lmao I thought I was dumb for not understanding despite having a BS in CS. Distributed systems are just inherently confusing (and I took distributed systems in college!). Definitely gonna be something that I contribute to on github though, it’s just a matter of time before I learn what I need to learn
Counter strike?
I think these are “nice to have” features rather than absolutely essential, but:
For 1. I could deal with just being able to download my list of subscriptions and upload it to another server. That’s the only bit that’s really slow to copy over by hand.
For 2. I think the main thing that really would benefit is the ability to search all active communities on all servers. The way it is now is alright if there are only half a dozen really active instances whose communities I might be interested in, but it doesn’t scale if there are hundreds of servers to check out. Probably the more important of the two IMHO in the long run.
Being able to download your own data would be a start
Yeah, search all federated communities.
It would not be hard to get a list of all communities on each federated instance. Update it a few times a day, even once a day.
But this is the hardest thing for me, searching is a challenge
Point 1 is part of why I’m gonna start self-hosting a Lemmy instance at some point. If I host my own instance then I can back up my data and ensure it’s never lost.
Lemmy needs two things to be successful:
- users
- users
and it’s already getting more and more of each of those.
It won’t get more users if it continues to be difficult to use.
I mean …
That’s active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.
So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.
One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don’t think it’s right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren’t.
Twelve of those are mine, due partly to the very shortcomings being discussed here.
The reality is that reddit still exists, and is still more user-friendly (and that’s a low bar). It’s great that lemmy is getting this bump, but it won’t last unless we make it easy to switch for most people. If lemmy was good enough to be a reddit alternative already, it would be. But it’s not, and the only reason people are here is because of the protest.
I think I’m just not that worried about making it easy for “most people” right now. The nature of open source projects means that enthusiastic users can and do contribute to infrastructure, and as more people come along, more people will start working on making things better. There’s a reason reddit decided to fuck over third party API calls, and its because open source projects became better than their own shit, and they apparently think that they’re losing potential money because of it. Projects like Apollo would not be getting cut off if they weren’t seen as a threat to reddit’s business model. If lemmy survives, the breadth and depth of community driven infrastructure will outpace reddit eventually. If it doesn’t, well… then somebody will try something else. No biggie. Cool shit takes time to build.
That makes total sense. I hope to contribute sometime :)
That’s a damned good point!
In what way is reddit more user-friendly?
One account gives you access to all the communities?
Years of UI/UX development (arguably, both are bad, but still more developed than anything Lemmy has)?
Easily navigate a user’s post- and comment history?
Space for more specialised communities due to larger user base?
More, and more experienced, mods due to larger user base?
I’m sure we could play this game all day. I guess it depends on whether you see each instance as an individual “Reddit”, or see Lemmy as a fractured “Reddit” with big chasms that need separate accounts to be successfully bridged.
Personally, I see Lemmy as potentially being the latter. Having one Lemmy account (or maybe even one ActivityPub account) would allow me to subscribe to the communities I’m interested in, without having to worry about whether those communities are federated with each other. The instance mods can still de/federated how they feel they need to, in order to make their mod tasks manageable.
If BeeHaw still wants a manual application process for vetting purposes, it shouldn’t matter if I’m asking for permission to create an account, or asking for permission to bring in my already existing account. Instance mods can still gatekeep to the exact level that they want.
- Create account
- interact with community
- ???
- Profit
Terribly difficult
Thank you for that insightful comment. You’ve really addressed my point in its entirety, and thoroughly proven me to be a dullard. I submit to your vast intelligence.
people kept saying similar stuff about Mastodon, and yet, miraculously, its user base somehow keeps growing.
Yup exactly. How do you define successful anyway? It’s say that Lemmy is already successful and it’s likely to continue to grow.
It’s unlikely Lemmy will ever be more successful than Reddit, but it doesn’t need to be.
It is a lot easier to attract users if you do not have to make an account on many different instances
Good thing you don’t have to do that then!
You don’t need to make accounts on many instances.
Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy
Federation is not reliably delivering comments and other Lemmy content between servers. People need to be looking for such problems, so far there isn’t any tool to observe or track this problem.
The Fediverse in general needs federated identities, preferrably self-sovereign. Something like nostr, with validation signatures. E.g., you own your ID, and validate it with some mechanism of your preference. If midwest.social trusts your validator, it creates a space for your ID.
I don’t think this is conceptually or implementationally difficult, but it would require a well written standard and consider both privacy issues (for users) and protections against spammers and bad actors (for hosting providers). I don’t thing PGP’s web-of-trust model would be a bad one. I think using the nostr network (quasi online chain) would be a great idea, and all of the parts are there; it would need a decent UI and support in each Fedi server implementation - which would be the biggest hurdle.
This would address the DID issue, and I agree with you that this is issue #1. Right now, users don’t own their identities: their hosting service does. If midwest.social chose to, they could nuke my account and the canonical source of truth for all my posts. I run my own ActivityPub server and so own the account I use for Mastodon; and, perhaps, someday Fediverse federation will evolve to the point where I can use that account for everything. But it’s an expensive node for me to operate, and not everyone can run their own server. Better, self-sovereign, and truly federated DIDs is incredibly important.
Lemmy needs me to be able to login…Let’s start with the basics.
Decentralized Identity could be implemented relatively easily just by allowing users to enter a their public key, like in git or PGP. How to sync the data is a different matter though. Maybe you can enter a username (e.g. @user@instance) in your instance’s search field and have it federated to your account there if the cryptographic signature matches?
I think there’s a third big thing: really good UX. I don’t have an Android phone, so I don’t know about Jerboa, but the web interface … could use some work. I know the bug with new posts pushing the feed down is on track to be fixed soon, but wow, it can be really quite bad. iOS apps are getting way better quickly, too, but overall they’re nascent.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but additionally, I think the ranking algorithm(s) could use some work. I can see there’s tons of content, if I sort by new, but sorting by active results in stale posts, and sorting by hot doesn’t seem to quite hit the sweet spot on tenured/good quality content vs. newness. The recent ranking bug(s) haven’t helped matters there either.
but sorting by active results in stale
yep, the default sorting makes it looks like nothing has been posted for 3 days
It should be that the more popular the post is the more interaction it needs to stay at the top. That might even out the newer smaller posts.
At least for now always sorting by new is very pleasant.
100% agreed with both. Especially DIDs just need to happen on all ActivityPub platforms. It will not only free users from being locked to an instance, but it will also allow instances to be much more flexible in scaling their capacity. Lemmy.ml is overloaded because they have too many users, and anyone who signed up there can no longer use their account. DID would allow them to immediately use their account from any small or large instance with spare capacity without changing the experience. The same would go for Mastodon.
It sounds like a moderation nightmare having people come over to your instance with a whole lot of content they’ve created that are now being hosted by your servers. You’ve got to look through the whole thing to make sure it is not breaking TOS of your instance. Doesn’t sound great to me.
The most straightforward way of resolving #1 (for those so inclined to resolve it) is to host your own instance. Your “identity” becomes the right-side of the @ rather than the left.
I don’t see why the content they’ve created would have to go along with. You could keep the content on the server, but have the posting user be offsite, like posting to another service/community. If the user has moved off your server, just alter the local profile to point to their “new” location.
It would be less overhead than moving the physical posts themselves, especially if things get bigger later on.
There’s many different ways DID could be implemented on top of ActivityPub. I don’t think full content replication (what you’re mentioning) is likely as that’s a fundamentally different style of protocol.
But I can imagine signing in to a different instance with my ID, at which point I subscribe to all my communities from this instance and get notifications if someone replies to one of my comments etc. Just as if I had created an account on this instance and had posted from there. It just means “your” instance can go down and you can continue future interactions mostly uninterrupted from another instance.
And it’s more useful in the case of microblogging, where with DID you can publish posts from any instance and your followers will see them. No need for a manual account migration or anything.
Depending on the implementation, I feel that DIDs across ActivityPub could make the aspect of interoperability between different services much more appealing as well. While I think it’s interesting that we can directly interact with posts from entirely different services like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, and Friendica, I find it difficult to make the feature make sense for daily usage beyond the convenience of not having to open another site/client for a singular interaction. I feel like it makes sense if you only prefer a single service/format for accessing content, but every software implementation handles content differently, with differing formats, features, and limitations. They each specialize at accessing and presenting the fediverse in their own ways, so there’s reason to use each individual application. If you still have to make a separate account for both instances to interact when using either of them, I feel that defeats the purpose of the interconnectivity aspect. By being able to connect the same account to instances between different software, I think this would strengthen it.
A few points about #1 I did not see talked about. First global ID is of a lot less value on Forums then on things like Mastodon. At least the way I use forums I have no interest in building a persona. Frankly would prefer totally different IDs on different servers and frankly I think we should encourage people to be subject focused not persona focused on Lemmy anyway. There’s to much of this ego stuff that goes on on other platforms.
The second thing is logging into multiple systems is a solved problem. If you do not have a password manager get one. Bitwarden or one of the LastPass versions depending on your platform for example. Another better way is SQRL or U2F. There is also a more recent thing, maybe PassKeys (?), cannot remember. In particular central authentication servers are nuts. Not even LastPass that specializes in them could do it correctly. Just NO. More then that let us not rebuild Reddit. We do not want central infrastructure.
I understand that you don’t. But some of us do not mind these things and/or want them. Perhaps there is a compromise (e.g. an optional global ID if you opt in to the system)
I feel the same way - totally understand why some people wouldn’t, but I definitely would appreciate the utility. Looking at the way someone interacts with others is often a consideration when I’m deciding whether to engage with them myself.
Been exploring, setting up my account, learning to use lemmy since 2am, this is the fundamental issue in facing, one that I cannot seem to wrap my head around.
I’m not sure (someone can correct me if I’m wrong) if my account is in certain instance, I can subscribe to communities in that instance, or other external instances. However, subscribing to communities in other instances is pretty tedious. I still don’t know how to reliably do it on PC let alone mobile. It’s a toss up for me if it’ll open in my account or a new page asking me to log in to that instance.
Hopefully in the coming months lemmy can take off and we can have something amazing on our hands
You can subscribe to any content anywhere as long as neither instance is on the other’s block list. If your instance hasn’t federated with the other instance yet, then you need to do that thing where you search for “!community@instance” and wait a few minutes. Otherwise, you just go to that community while on your home instance (e.g. for you, “mander.xyz/c/community@instance”) and click subscribe.
Heck, you don’t even need to enter the community in the
!community@instanceformat. Simply copy pasting the community url likehttps://lemmy.world/c/communitynameto the search field works as well.TIL. I guess they must have improved it recently. That’s one of the worst parts about starting on a smaller instance for sure. Being able to copy+paste the URL from its source is really helpful.
