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Federation is never going to work with normal users and this thread alone proves why. The top comments are bickering about defederation and fragmentation. Norm

Federation is never going to work with normal users and this thread alone proves why. The top comments are bickering about defederation and fragmentation. Normal people don't care, this is all too complex and the community politics are mind numbing. It's no wonder centralized systems continue to win. I'm a technical person and I don't even want to bother with this kind of stuff.

hombre_fatal 3y ago
This list is about as interesting as a list of all phpBB/vBulletin communities: there's almost nothing actionable about scrolling it beyond clicking at random. Might as well just google "best internet forums" and do the same.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
10 years ago, I’d be all over this. Nowadays, I have so many other more important things that I have no interest in the mental load that comes with Lemmy. Lemmy’s type of social media is mindless, timing filling. Having to figure out the nuance of federation defeats the entire point. Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  > most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. How would you know that?
  - supertrope 3y ago
    The usual suspects are porn, gambling, illegal drugs, copyright infringement, National Socialism.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    It'd be impossible to prove, but the types of topics I utilize social media for simply don't tend to correlate with highly-controlled/highly-censored topics. Generally, highly-censored topics result in alternative communities in grey areas of the web. I just don't see those types of communities popping up for wood working, programming, or the sports that I enjoy.
- nulld3v 3y ago
  > Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media. There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading). There's already a ton of posts on HN about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28318521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28318521
  - bacchusracine 3y ago
    >There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading). No, see, since it hasn't effected them (yet?)there is no good faith reason to be against censorship. The only ones effected by it or worried by it are the wrongthinkers and bad people and who cares about them?
    - SkyPuncher 3y ago
      That’s a full mis-representation of my argument while projecting your view.
      - bacchusracine 3y ago
        > That’s a full mis-representation of my argument while projecting your view. Apologies for not being more clear but I was actually agreeing with you from the sarcastic viewpoint of the person you were replying to.
        SkyPuncher 3y ago
        Apologies. Your impression of the argument was so spot on that I couldn't actually read the sarcasm in it :P Just to be clear, I think there are bad forms of censorship. My point is simply my use of social media tends to not overlap with the places where those bad forms of censorship occur.
nulld3v 3y ago
There's no fundamental problem with federation. The UX can be made good enough for the average user. The problem here is the developers. Federation developers don't seem to be interested in UX. They aren't focusing on adding the polish and ease-of-use users expect out of a social media platform. 90% of the issues with Lemmy isn't because of federation. It's because of basic UX: - Error messages silently discarded everywhere. Stuff "loads forever" when in reality some error has happened and the operation has already failed. - Links to other instances are not handled properly (WTF? Links to other instances are a huge part of federation, how could you not handle this properly?) - To follow a community in another instance, you have to search the community? TWICE! (The first search loads the community asynchronously in the background). WTF? - They decided to rewrite the entire UI using websockets causing bugs everywhere? WTF? Over-engineering at its finest. At least they are trying to undo the rewrite currently... - Searching for communities should search through all communities that the instance is federated with. It should feel like there's only one instance. Right now search shows only cached communities. WTF? Are we expecting users to understand caches? I'm hoping that the influx of new developers (who are more UX focused) is enough to polish the platform for end-user use by June 30th. It's going to be difficult, but it's possible.
- xedrac 3y ago
  Are there any examples of federated platforms with mass appeal? The architecture details seem to dominate the UX.
  - nulld3v 3y ago
    Other than "email"? I don't think so unfortunately. I think federation has consistently failed on the UX side. You still can't migrate posts in Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 It's been 4 years...

hombre_fatal 3y ago

This list is about as interesting as a list of all phpBB/vBulletin communities: there's almost nothing actionable about scrolling it beyond clicking at random. Might as well just google "best internet forums" and do the same.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

10 years ago, I’d be all over this. Nowadays, I have so many other more important things that I have no interest in the mental load that comes with Lemmy. Lemmy’s type of social media is mindless, timing filling. Having to figure out the nuance of federation defeats the entire point. Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media.

newZWhoDis 3y ago
> most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. How would you know that?
- supertrope 3y ago
  The usual suspects are porn, gambling, illegal drugs, copyright infringement, National Socialism.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  It'd be impossible to prove, but the types of topics I utilize social media for simply don't tend to correlate with highly-controlled/highly-censored topics. Generally, highly-censored topics result in alternative communities in grey areas of the web. I just don't see those types of communities popping up for wood working, programming, or the sports that I enjoy.
nulld3v 3y ago
> Further, the primary reason for federation seems to be anti-censorship. While there are absolutely cases where censorship is applied to destroy/control, most of the topics I engage in on social media have little to no censorship. It seems like the only people that care about “avoiding a central authority” are those looking to stir hate and trouble on social media. There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading). There's already a ton of posts on HN about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28318521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28318521
- bacchusracine 3y ago
  >There's plenty of censorship on many large Reddit subs already. Just look at the difference between r/worldnews and r/anime_titties (which is also world news, name is misleading). No, see, since it hasn't effected them (yet?)there is no good faith reason to be against censorship. The only ones effected by it or worried by it are the wrongthinkers and bad people and who cares about them?
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    That’s a full mis-representation of my argument while projecting your view.
    - bacchusracine 3y ago
      > That’s a full mis-representation of my argument while projecting your view. Apologies for not being more clear but I was actually agreeing with you from the sarcastic viewpoint of the person you were replying to.
      - SkyPuncher 3y ago
        Apologies. Your impression of the argument was so spot on that I couldn't actually read the sarcasm in it :P Just to be clear, I think there are bad forms of censorship. My point is simply my use of social media tends to not overlap with the places where those bad forms of censorship occur.

nulld3v 3y ago

There's no fundamental problem with federation. The UX can be made good enough for the average user. The problem here is the developers. Federation developers don't seem to be interested in UX. They aren't focusing on adding the polish and ease-of-use users expect out of a social media platform. 90% of the issues with Lemmy isn't because of federation. It's because of basic UX: - Error messages silently discarded everywhere. Stuff "loads forever" when in reality some error has happened and the operation has already failed. - Links to other instances are not handled properly (WTF? Links to other instances are a huge part of federation, how could you not handle this properly?) - To follow a community in another instance, you have to search the community? TWICE! (The first search loads the community asynchronously in the background). WTF? - They decided to rewrite the entire UI using websockets causing bugs everywhere? WTF? Over-engineering at its finest. At least they are trying to undo the rewrite currently... - Searching for communities should search through all communities that the instance is federated with. It should feel like there's only one instance. Right now search shows only cached communities. WTF? Are we expecting users to understand caches? I'm hoping that the influx of new developers (who are more UX focused) is enough to polish the platform for end-user use by June 30th. It's going to be difficult, but it's possible.

xedrac 3y ago
Are there any examples of federated platforms with mass appeal? The architecture details seem to dominate the UX.
- nulld3v 3y ago
  Other than "email"? I don't think so unfortunately. I think federation has consistently failed on the UX side. You still can't migrate posts in Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 It's been 4 years...