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I really like lemmy too. I think the biggest issue is that people think of Lemmy itself as the replacement of reddit.com. But what makes more sense to me is thi

I really like lemmy too. I think the biggest issue is that people think of Lemmy itself as the replacement of reddit.com. But what makes more sense to me is thinking about Lemmy as a tool to build separate websites that are each a replacement for reddit.com and that these can interoperate with each other to grow based on the local users interests. I think the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account... it's just not intuitive and of course the more established sites shut down signups during mass waves as an anti-September protective measure. I ended up starting at programming.dev because someone on HN mentioned it and it at least seemed to have a focus and also wasn't a ghost town. And that was pretty good but I've also joined beehaw (takes some time) because I like its size and decorum and generically would choose to get on their side of a defederation. And after I'm starting to understand how this whole activity pub and defederation and federation works, I really am optimistic about it. I think somebody needs to build something that's a crossover between GitHub pages and activitypub that sort of behaves like discus and integrates with Lemmy/kbin/mastodon. So that blog writers can have comments at their own sites again and they can integrate together to grow organically. I haven't quite pieced it all together, but I sort of see that could grow as a replacement for what we lost with Google Reader and the loss of blog commenting communities.

Terr_ 3y ago
> I think that's the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account. Agreed. I think the barrier would be lower if I knew I could migrate my identity to another instance if the first one became sketchy or shut down or de-federated. Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identity indefinitely going forward.
- firecall 3y ago
  Maybe we need some sort of self-identifying system. Like SSH keys, where you manage your own identity and then share a public key to each instance that identifies you to that instance. Like an identity client you could self manage if you wanted to. Make it optional, portable, and transferable. So you can choose to let a server host manage your identity, or migrate to a self managed identity. If I had more time on my hands….
  - fluidcruft 3y ago
    I've seen discussions that Mastodon has a way of migrating accounts. I don't know if that's a Mastodon specific thing or at the ActivityPub level. I don't think it migrates the content but I'm not sure. What I think it does is notify followers of the migration. I'm not sure anything like PKI is necessary. Conceptually a planned migrations should have a period of concurrent access to both the old and new accounts and it should be easy to publish a handshake to confirm the migration to followers to update contact info. That's my thought anyway. Something like keybase (does that still exist?) could also be used for similar sorts of proofs. The way people used to handle this on Reddit is people would send a message from their old account saying "hey XYZ is my new account" and that seems sufficient.
jug 3y ago
Yeah, good point about instances being communities! It’s like how the Star Trek one did it and my mind boggled when I realized you could (and someone has done so) make a national Lemmy _instance_ rather than just a /r/mycountry. And then everything there is localized! So you basically have a social news _site_ in your language that can federate with all the rest. Of course, this goes for any major interest category but it just hit me the hardest so far to realize this. Another cool development would be a science-oriented Lemmy instance with lots of special purpose sciency stuff. Viewed like this, the sky is the limit for Lemmy and it could have potential to grow a lot!
- ruffsl 3y ago
  > Another cool development would be a science-oriented Lemmy instance with lots of special purpose sciency stuff. Something like this? https://mander.xyz/communities https://mander.xyz/communities > An instance dedicated to nature and science. > The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.

Terr_ 3y ago

> I think that's the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account. Agreed. I think the barrier would be lower if I knew I could migrate my identity to another instance if the first one became sketchy or shut down or de-federated. Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identity indefinitely going forward.

firecall 3y ago
Maybe we need some sort of self-identifying system. Like SSH keys, where you manage your own identity and then share a public key to each instance that identifies you to that instance. Like an identity client you could self manage if you wanted to. Make it optional, portable, and transferable. So you can choose to let a server host manage your identity, or migrate to a self managed identity. If I had more time on my hands….
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  I've seen discussions that Mastodon has a way of migrating accounts. I don't know if that's a Mastodon specific thing or at the ActivityPub level. I don't think it migrates the content but I'm not sure. What I think it does is notify followers of the migration. I'm not sure anything like PKI is necessary. Conceptually a planned migrations should have a period of concurrent access to both the old and new accounts and it should be easy to publish a handshake to confirm the migration to followers to update contact info. That's my thought anyway. Something like keybase (does that still exist?) could also be used for similar sorts of proofs. The way people used to handle this on Reddit is people would send a message from their old account saying "hey XYZ is my new account" and that seems sufficient.

jug 3y ago

Yeah, good point about instances being communities! It’s like how the Star Trek one did it and my mind boggled when I realized you could (and someone has done so) make a national Lemmy _instance_ rather than just a /r/mycountry. And then everything there is localized! So you basically have a social news _site_ in your language that can federate with all the rest. Of course, this goes for any major interest category but it just hit me the hardest so far to realize this. Another cool development would be a science-oriented Lemmy instance with lots of special purpose sciency stuff. Viewed like this, the sky is the limit for Lemmy and it could have potential to grow a lot!

ruffsl 3y ago
> Another cool development would be a science-oriented Lemmy instance with lots of special purpose sciency stuff. Something like this? https://mander.xyz/communities https://mander.xyz/communities > An instance dedicated to nature and science. > The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.