7 ms·

Lenny has a major issue (which I think is a fatal flaw) which is that as soon as you go to the site you have to choose a server (of which there are hundreds) an

Lenny has a major issue (which I think is a fatal flaw) which is that as soon as you go to the site you have to choose a server (of which there are hundreds) and you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site. No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. Even for myself I’m probably not going to use Lemmy because it seems stupid to have to join multiple “Lemmys” and make multiple accounts, this isn’t a good user experience. People are supposed to have separate accounts for every Lemmy? All the communities are disparate and separated? It makes no sense to me at all.

PUSH_AX 3y ago
I’m a technical user and the hoops and quirks in eco system put me off. The solution I’ve been left with is just to quit entirely. I’ve also ditched other social media while I’m at it. My life is better.
- rjh29 3y ago
  It's technically trivial to join lemmy. It would be more accurate to say you're not motivated enough. Which is fine, lemme has a lot of issues and it needs users who are invested at this point.
  - PUSH_AX 3y ago
    Op made the distinction that non technical users are put off, my position was that it doesn’t matter, I’m technical and I still don’t want to. The user experience and understanding the proposition are barriers to entry, of course the vast majority of people could sit down and “get it” after not long.. I’m at a point where if it’s not a website and it’s trying to be something more, I just really don’t care.
asicsp 3y ago
I joined https://programming.dev/ https://programming.dev/ and I can subscribe to both local and other instances (assuming they talk to each other).
daruk 3y ago
No, you make a single account and subscribe to the communities across whatever servers you want. The exception would be if the server you registered and the server hosting your desired community had become intentionally unfederated/disconnected, but hopefully that doesn’t happen too much. The third-party apps (like Memmy) are making the UX more seamless with subscribing to communities across different servers.
- CommitSyn 3y ago
  I was having major issues getting federation to work while using the mobile web app. Now that I installed Connect for Lemmy (android) tonight, I finally have a seamless experience subscribing to and interacting with communities from all over the fediverse. It's a brand new technology and system, for the most part. Give them time to make it more user-friendly. It's worth it joining and participating now IMO, but I think in 6 months or a year it will be MUCH more friendly to the average Joe.
  - etler 3y ago
    Lots of the Reddit apps are being ported for Lemmy as we speak so it's about to get even better and easy to use. At the end of this all, the biggest mistake that Reddit will have made may be sending all the most talented devs creating apps for their platform to their direct competitors.
- pas 3y ago
  it happens, and worse it happens silently, terrible UX - though of course a very hard problem, and lemmy is still very young
FormerBandmate 3y ago
The main difference appears to be random ideological shit. The instances I’ve heard of are Beehaw, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, ShitJustWorks, and ExplodingHeads, and all of them have been involved in defederation because of trolls or fascists or tankies or something Tbh I’m not sure what the main advantage of federation is if they all have the same subreddits (news, tech, pics, etc). It seems like it just fragments the userbase, I’d get it if each subreddit was one instance
- zodac02 3y ago
  Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I want a community for my football club, but there are already 3 across multiple instances - which one do I join? Would much better understand if each 'subreddit' was something that was federated and could be defederated and users all moved to another instance. But right now, it's just too fragmented.
  - pndy 3y ago
    I'd try to join place that has lots of people, ignoring all the ideological fights or other kinds of backstage dramas and focus on football, people who like it.
  - nstart 3y ago
    I second the other comment just made in reply to yours. I also want to add that this would kind of happen on Reddit as well where occasionally there’ll be more than one community for the same topic. Sometimes it’s different themes (there’s standard mature f1 and there’s the f1 that just wants to shitpost and meme). Sometimes one community exists but hasn’t gotten enough attention or growth moderation so people join a more well managed one. Sometimes one community exists for general purpose discussion and one for more specific stuff (like cycling vs randonneuring) I feel like similar things will happen in the forum fediverse (it’s what I call the fediverse alternatives to Reddit). There’s going to be a period of thrashing and churn. And then it’ll settle down with each community having its own vibe and we members get to try it out and settle where we want.
  - CommitSyn 3y ago
SemioticStandrd 3y ago
It’s kinda like email. You wouldn’t create an account with Google and expect that login to work anywhere else, would you? But your Gmail email address can send and receive to anyone else from any provider. As far as which instance to join, well, that’s kinda like email, too. Look at the instances that are out there (the email providers in this example, like Gmail vs Mailfence), see if you like their policies and moderation and community “vibe,” and join the one that suits you. https://beehaw.org https://beehaw.org is a big one that I like very much. Not really any memes there, the user base tends more toward the mature and considerate, and overall the level of interaction feels much better than Reddit ever did, post Digg exodus.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  The annoying thing is that links don’t work properly. If someone links to a post, you won’t be logged in when you click it. This is also a problem with mastodon. As well as the fact that instances constantly shut down or have insane admins.
  - NoboruWataya 3y ago
    What I would love to see is a browser extension that recognises when you are browsing a Lemmy instance and allows you to seamlessly interact with it from your "home" instance.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      Honestly what I'd like to see is a centralised reddit replacement that covers the majority of features and UX that old reddit had. I tried voat when it first came out and it seemed to work pretty well. Only issue is it was quickly overwhelmed by racists. Lemmy is probably taking on too large of a problem. No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet.
      - NoboruWataya 3y ago
        > No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet. They never will. Federated systems have certain advantages over centralised ones. One of the principal advantages is that it allows hosting costs to be shared more widely, which means you don't need a single entity with hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the thing. Another is that toxic communities can be more easily isolated from the rest (so that the communities you like don't become quickly overwhelmed by racists). One of the disadvantages is that there is more friction than a single, centralised system. It is, by definition, not as seamless. The seams are the feature. It's just the trade-off you make.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wirrbel 3y ago
no need to make multiple accounts, who told you that? You need one account and then can contribute to all Lemmy communities on all servers. The flaw of lemmy's design is that communities reside on a single service, so you will end up with multiple "Science" communities, because in the founding phase several people created such a community of the same name on multiple servers. They should instead have used a hashtag-based approach (granted, problem then is the tight-knit moderation that makes subreddits like AskHistorians so valuable), or implement something like communities subscribing to other communities (like a community-ring) etc.
- takeda 3y ago
  There is actually a ticket on github and is getting some attention now that would allow to combine multiple communities to make them seen at one (kind of like multisubreddits)
- matsimitsu 3y ago
  > You need one account and then can contribute to all Lemmy communities on all servers. That's not entirely true, some of the larger instances have no open federation policy, meaning the owner of the instance you are on has to get itself allowlisted in order to federate. In practice this means that you can follow _some_ communities on _some_ other servers, but not all, and not every popular server. Add that to the fact that some larger instances have stopped federating with each other and you have the current state; a minefield where your average user tries Lemmy, pastes a link into it's search box as instructed, nothing shows up and goes back to Reddit.
- impissedoff1 3y ago
  Unless an instance you want to visit and be a part of got defederated, this is a huge issue.
takeda 3y ago
The servers are connected, you can have account on one server and talk to people in communities on other server. Kind of like with email, you don't need to have account with Gmail to send an email to friend on that server.
- brabel 3y ago
  Except when other instances defederate your instance... like happened with lemmy.world (where I am) for some very stupid reason... the worst thing is that it still looks like you can see and interact with other instances! But when you make a comment, for example, in a post from the other instance, only you and people from your instance will see that :D. It's kind of ridiculous, really. I like Lemmy in general, it's what you would expect from a Reddit clone... but because of this kind of stuff, it's really going to be a hard sell for anyone who's not fundamentally a "fediverse" fan who wants Reddit to burn.
  - cuu508 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, what was the reason for defederation?
    - brabel 3y ago
      https://lemmy.world/post/330415 https://lemmy.world/post/330415 https://lemmy.world/post/302384 https://lemmy.world/post/302384
    - domtron_vox 3y ago
      Haven't used lemmy in particular. But in theory defederation exists to block bad actors. Since anyone can host a server themselves and no one can stop the servers outside some kind of government intervention, each server needs the ability to block a spammy or even illegal content filled server. In reality, it is used for that and the censorship of ideas server owners don't like... or even just blocking a server because the admins of each server had a spat. It has been likened to little fifedoms each with their own flavor of tyrant, a little drematic imo but not wholely wrong either. Another use is if you want to use the software, but don't want/need connections to the greater network. So you fully defederate and only allow your friends to have logins to your isolated server.
postpawl 3y ago
Creating accounts on multiple websites is something we all do all the time. It’s better than staying with a single rent-seeking site that’s getting increasingly aggressive about monetizing the content provided for free by its users. Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with. Reddit users shouldn’t be happy about a site (and app) that has only gotten worse over the years. It has also never been easier to replace Reddit and Twitter technologically. This is a key opportunity to fight against the enshittification of the internet and you’re on here complaining about creating multiple accounts… Ugh
- dash2 3y ago
  I predict that not everyone will be furious, even if they should, and that the barriers to entry that GP mentions will indeed be an obstacle to mastodon’s growth, even if you think they shouldn’t.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    inevitably. But it's not about dethroning Twitter/reddit, it's about making an active alternative. Will that barrier be too large? I guess history will tell.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with. 1. Twitter was and still is a commercial product, not to mention publicly traded. Buying and selling it is completely fine and ordinary. It's nothing to feel furious about, especially if you aren't going to put up a competing offer. 2. Wouldn't you (and 99% of people) also spend money to amplify your opinions far and wide if you had such money? Hell, the entire reason most people use social media is because they want to amplify their opinions far and wide.
  - postpawl 3y ago
    Almost nobody can afford a competing offer. You’re seriously sticking up for some billionaire who bought what was effectively a public square of the internet to turn it into self promoting crap? Are you also one of those people who said it was going to be great for free speech before he started banning journalists who criticized him?
zorked 3y ago
Federation is its own thing. I use Lemmys and Kbins but I follow the communities from my Mastodon account, so the number of extra accounts I created is zero. It's super-neat, actually.
nxpnsv 3y ago
You don’t need multiple accounts, i can post and follow stuff across the threadiverse from my single account.
rektide 3y ago
Ah yes, the forever cry of fascism. 'Only centralized winner take all systems can ever win. Anything else is surely too difficult & could never ever possibly get anywhere. Because that's what my very important opinion says. Get used to hearing this call friends, it will be repeated verbatim forever, for surely your attempts are futile!' Change doesn't have to come overnight, or even soon. Better is not on a deadline. Society can adapt & improve slowly too, in difficult not easy win struggles. This article is about 0.025% of the planet signing up, mostly within a couple months. To me, one that that ain't bad! The growth trend isn't likely to continue apace but this like critical mass, like a seed successfully germinating, for a long life, that can bring who knows what. But of course overwhelmingly negative doomsaying 'it'll never work' is the tried & true forever response to all efforts to do anything other than a couple centralized megaproperties. Everything is too hard for users at scale. Only bad can win. Resign. Give up. Don't try. Unless you have 3b+ users you shouldn't even try. This is just going to be the same point forever & ever, anytime anything good might possibly happen.
eco 3y ago
I know this point was already made but it really is just email but with your email provider also offering public mailing lists. It kept feeling super complicated until I realized that's all it is. Don't overthink which instance to choose. Just sign up for Lemmy.world or any of the other "general purpose" instance. It's not terribly important. The one caveat to that is that you may want to choose beehaw instead if you strongly value a more heavily moderated experience. As I understand it, Beehaw intends to refederate once there are better moderation tools available on Lemmy but for now they are separated.
donmcronald 3y ago
> No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. Having all the casual users left behind and siloed on Reddit would be glorious. Lol.
throwaway5Am1k 3y ago
>you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site. No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. This is a feature in my opinion. Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit). It's taboo, but gatekeeping communities is absolutely required to stop mass adoption and the downward spiral. Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > This is a feature in my opinion. I tried to join a server. Went through a long list of them. I was confused on which to pick, and if that decision mattered, and what would be the security implications of it. I finally picked one reluctantly. The server was down. Not a great feature. Feels more like a bug. > Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit). Nonsense. Mass adoption means it's the place to go to consume and produce content. If the feature of Lemmy you single out as being better is that no one uses it then I'm not sure what would be the point of joining, or why are you promoting the service so that others join. > Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020. No it wasn't. At best, it was different. And people like me are leaving 2023 Reddit, not 2010 Reddit. What we want is an alternative to today's service, not nostalgia.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
    > I tried to join a server. This is already a failure. There is no need to join unless you find a topic you want participate in. And you event don't have to, you can even use a mastodon (pleroma, friendica, e.t.c.) account if you already have it if you just want to leave a comment in a thread.
darthrupert 3y ago
>No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. From the point of view of active Lemmy users, this is not a problem. Casual users don't contribute, so they're essentially just leeches from the point of view of the overall service. Kinda same thing as with pure FOSS. Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way.
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  > Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way. Not at all. In fact it is the non contributing users that give value to your product. Imagine Firefox but without any end users. Similarly, reddit is valuable mostly because of the massive number of people viewing content on it. Youtube is valuable because of the huge number of people who just watch videos, never make anything. The content creators, or contributors, will flock to wherever the non contributors are.
  - darthrupert 3y ago
    >Imagine Firefox but without any end users. Firefox isn't FOSS in this argument in the way I mean, because they extract actual monetary value from their users.
- zajio1am 3y ago
  As a FOSS developer, i must say that for me, users as a whole (in contrast to a community around the project) are the primary purpose of developing FOSS. And even if i just looked on non-contributing users in a utilitarian way, they are still useful for project brand recognition.
janandonly 3y ago
The model NOSTR uses is more like what you expect, then. One Private/Public key-pair is all you need to fetch data from, and upload your own posts to all NOSTR relays. The only complicating factor now is that, to prevent spam, some relays [0] are requiring a one time or recurring payment. [0] https://relay.exchange https://relay.exchange
NoboruWataya 3y ago
- No, you don't need to create a separate account for every Lemmy. Federation means you create an account on one instance (that is federated with a lot of other instances) and you can interact with those other instances. - Yes, it takes five minutes of research to figure that out. It might also take another five minutes of research to ensure you don't choose an extremist or troll instance that will get defederated from all the others. Yes, there is friction that wasn't there with Reddit. Convenience is not what Lemmy is optimised for. If you value convenience above all else then it's probably not for you.
etler 3y ago
It being distributed is the whole point. I think the whole thing is intended to slow you down and be more considerate about being a part of a community. Many servers require you to fill out a form explaining why you want to join the server. I think that's a good thing. People online need to slow down and think more deeply before posting and any community that promotes that I'm all for.
basq 3y ago
Reddit was a lot better before the "casual users" showed up so maybe that's a good thing.
rakoo 3y ago
It's always the same comment: X is different from A, therefore X is not a good replacement for A. The whole point of federation is to avoid the problems we're seeing with Facebook, with Instagram, with Reddit, with Twitter: control over your internet content. Not having a mega-corp bent on maximizing profits and using you as a milking cow, but instead have a say and have actual power in how communities are built and managed. It is 100% expected that Lemmy or KBin is different from Reddit. You say that's not a good user experience, but I challenge that assertion: I say it's not a bad UX, but it's a different UX, and you don't want to change. Well, if you don't want to change, stay on Reddit, that's not a problem. But if you're going to investigate what the fediverse is, please learn what it's about, how it's built. Don't expect to find the same old world you know, that's on purpose ! > It makes no sense to me at all You're on HN, a forum where members pride themselves in being intelligent enough to dig around, learn by themselves, be different, hack around. You haven't made efforts understanding how the fediverse works, or why it's different, and your conclusion is _not_ that you should investigate, but that you should complain that it's too different. I don't understand this reasoning. I think an issue in the mentality in this forum is that people mostly expect products, ie a package that is made by an entity and that is served to users. The package is expected to be complete, shiny, wonderful, the entity is expected to do whatever it takes to convince users. It's an asymmetry that is completely opposite to the whole concept of being a hacker, which is supposed to be the H of HN. Here's a good post explaining what the fediverse is about: https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-the-fediverse-5b4ef3f8ed0e https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-... And here are a few links and resources if you want to go deeper: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Yea, I agree. Lemmy isn't getting the casual user because the casual user isn't leaving reddit. So why bother? This isn't to be gatekeeping, but I think trying to hope for some magical, identical reddit but without reddit's BS is both a fever dream and shortsighted. Do you believe Reddit2 to not fall into the same trap as reddit? We'd need something different to prevent that, and different is going to be less intuitive than the familiar. It's fine if you don't want to be in that firsr wave of figuring out how to make different work, others will figure It out and communicate their findings.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Presumably once the network has good replication there will be a number of good ones with all of the content, like newsgroups? They just seem really immature and definitely imperfect.
clnq 3y ago
> Lenny has a major issue (which I think is a fatal flaw) which is that as soon as you go to the site you have to choose a server (of which there are hundreds) and you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site. This is an outstanding advantage. Let Reddit be Reddit with its eternal September and easy access for everyone. Lemmy could build smaller and much more useful and expert communities. If one has something important to share, then finding an instance is no obstacle. If one just wants to mindlessly shitpost, then maybe it's good some social media sites will be worth too much effort for them to sign up. Personally, I would like paid and privacy-respecting social media sites focused on experts in their fields. Much like academic journals, but with modern social media features and for industry experts and enthusiasts as well as academics in a wide variety of fields traditional and not - everyone who is willing to put some effort into what they spend time on. I think that 0 price of entry is unnatural. No one accepts people in their social circles who spend 0 effort on participating in a mutually-beneficial way. And yet on the internet, that's the only kind of social networking most of us can do. So I say it's good we have a tiny test of effort for people who sign up to Lemmy. Socializing with 0 skin in the game is very unnatural and even if it's better in some philosophical way, the human brain hasn't evolved to deal with a massive amount of garbage that this kind of social networking brings. If you want to communicate something to a lot of people, the price of entry should be at least a modicum of effort. And this is not some far-out untested idea, it worked very well in the 90s.
3v1n0 3y ago
> it seems stupid to have to join multiple “Lemmys” and make multiple accounts, this isn’t a good user experience. Actually you only need to join one lemmy instance, then you can just use that for everything. And stuff like https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-lin... would help not to use yours.

PUSH_AX 3y ago

I’m a technical user and the hoops and quirks in eco system put me off. The solution I’ve been left with is just to quit entirely. I’ve also ditched other social media while I’m at it. My life is better.

rjh29 3y ago
It's technically trivial to join lemmy. It would be more accurate to say you're not motivated enough. Which is fine, lemme has a lot of issues and it needs users who are invested at this point.
- PUSH_AX 3y ago
  Op made the distinction that non technical users are put off, my position was that it doesn’t matter, I’m technical and I still don’t want to. The user experience and understanding the proposition are barriers to entry, of course the vast majority of people could sit down and “get it” after not long.. I’m at a point where if it’s not a website and it’s trying to be something more, I just really don’t care.

asicsp 3y ago

I joined https://programming.dev/ https://programming.dev/ and I can subscribe to both local and other instances (assuming they talk to each other).

daruk 3y ago

No, you make a single account and subscribe to the communities across whatever servers you want. The exception would be if the server you registered and the server hosting your desired community had become intentionally unfederated/disconnected, but hopefully that doesn’t happen too much. The third-party apps (like Memmy) are making the UX more seamless with subscribing to communities across different servers.

CommitSyn 3y ago
I was having major issues getting federation to work while using the mobile web app. Now that I installed Connect for Lemmy (android) tonight, I finally have a seamless experience subscribing to and interacting with communities from all over the fediverse. It's a brand new technology and system, for the most part. Give them time to make it more user-friendly. It's worth it joining and participating now IMO, but I think in 6 months or a year it will be MUCH more friendly to the average Joe.
- etler 3y ago
  Lots of the Reddit apps are being ported for Lemmy as we speak so it's about to get even better and easy to use. At the end of this all, the biggest mistake that Reddit will have made may be sending all the most talented devs creating apps for their platform to their direct competitors.
pas 3y ago
it happens, and worse it happens silently, terrible UX - though of course a very hard problem, and lemmy is still very young

FormerBandmate 3y ago

The main difference appears to be random ideological shit. The instances I’ve heard of are Beehaw, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, ShitJustWorks, and ExplodingHeads, and all of them have been involved in defederation because of trolls or fascists or tankies or something Tbh I’m not sure what the main advantage of federation is if they all have the same subreddits (news, tech, pics, etc). It seems like it just fragments the userbase, I’d get it if each subreddit was one instance

zodac02 3y ago
Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I want a community for my football club, but there are already 3 across multiple instances - which one do I join? Would much better understand if each 'subreddit' was something that was federated and could be defederated and users all moved to another instance. But right now, it's just too fragmented.
- pndy 3y ago
  I'd try to join place that has lots of people, ignoring all the ideological fights or other kinds of backstage dramas and focus on football, people who like it.
- nstart 3y ago
  I second the other comment just made in reply to yours. I also want to add that this would kind of happen on Reddit as well where occasionally there’ll be more than one community for the same topic. Sometimes it’s different themes (there’s standard mature f1 and there’s the f1 that just wants to shitpost and meme). Sometimes one community exists but hasn’t gotten enough attention or growth moderation so people join a more well managed one. Sometimes one community exists for general purpose discussion and one for more specific stuff (like cycling vs randonneuring) I feel like similar things will happen in the forum fediverse (it’s what I call the fediverse alternatives to Reddit). There’s going to be a period of thrashing and churn. And then it’ll settle down with each community having its own vibe and we members get to try it out and settle where we want.
- CommitSyn 3y ago

SemioticStandrd 3y ago

It’s kinda like email. You wouldn’t create an account with Google and expect that login to work anywhere else, would you? But your Gmail email address can send and receive to anyone else from any provider. As far as which instance to join, well, that’s kinda like email, too. Look at the instances that are out there (the email providers in this example, like Gmail vs Mailfence), see if you like their policies and moderation and community “vibe,” and join the one that suits you. https://beehaw.org https://beehaw.org is a big one that I like very much. Not really any memes there, the user base tends more toward the mature and considerate, and overall the level of interaction feels much better than Reddit ever did, post Digg exodus.

Gigachad 3y ago
The annoying thing is that links don’t work properly. If someone links to a post, you won’t be logged in when you click it. This is also a problem with mastodon. As well as the fact that instances constantly shut down or have insane admins.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  What I would love to see is a browser extension that recognises when you are browsing a Lemmy instance and allows you to seamlessly interact with it from your "home" instance.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Honestly what I'd like to see is a centralised reddit replacement that covers the majority of features and UX that old reddit had. I tried voat when it first came out and it seemed to work pretty well. Only issue is it was quickly overwhelmed by racists. Lemmy is probably taking on too large of a problem. No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet.
    - NoboruWataya 3y ago
      > No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet. They never will. Federated systems have certain advantages over centralised ones. One of the principal advantages is that it allows hosting costs to be shared more widely, which means you don't need a single entity with hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the thing. Another is that toxic communities can be more easily isolated from the rest (so that the communities you like don't become quickly overwhelmed by racists). One of the disadvantages is that there is more friction than a single, centralised system. It is, by definition, not as seamless. The seams are the feature. It's just the trade-off you make.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wirrbel 3y ago

no need to make multiple accounts, who told you that? You need one account and then can contribute to all Lemmy communities on all servers. The flaw of lemmy's design is that communities reside on a single service, so you will end up with multiple "Science" communities, because in the founding phase several people created such a community of the same name on multiple servers. They should instead have used a hashtag-based approach (granted, problem then is the tight-knit moderation that makes subreddits like AskHistorians so valuable), or implement something like communities subscribing to other communities (like a community-ring) etc.

takeda 3y ago
There is actually a ticket on github and is getting some attention now that would allow to combine multiple communities to make them seen at one (kind of like multisubreddits)
matsimitsu 3y ago
> You need one account and then can contribute to all Lemmy communities on all servers. That's not entirely true, some of the larger instances have no open federation policy, meaning the owner of the instance you are on has to get itself allowlisted in order to federate. In practice this means that you can follow _some_ communities on _some_ other servers, but not all, and not every popular server. Add that to the fact that some larger instances have stopped federating with each other and you have the current state; a minefield where your average user tries Lemmy, pastes a link into it's search box as instructed, nothing shows up and goes back to Reddit.
impissedoff1 3y ago
Unless an instance you want to visit and be a part of got defederated, this is a huge issue.

takeda 3y ago

The servers are connected, you can have account on one server and talk to people in communities on other server. Kind of like with email, you don't need to have account with Gmail to send an email to friend on that server.

brabel 3y ago
Except when other instances defederate your instance... like happened with lemmy.world (where I am) for some very stupid reason... the worst thing is that it still looks like you can see and interact with other instances! But when you make a comment, for example, in a post from the other instance, only you and people from your instance will see that :D. It's kind of ridiculous, really. I like Lemmy in general, it's what you would expect from a Reddit clone... but because of this kind of stuff, it's really going to be a hard sell for anyone who's not fundamentally a "fediverse" fan who wants Reddit to burn.
- cuu508 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, what was the reason for defederation?
  - brabel 3y ago
    https://lemmy.world/post/330415 https://lemmy.world/post/330415 https://lemmy.world/post/302384 https://lemmy.world/post/302384
  - domtron_vox 3y ago
    Haven't used lemmy in particular. But in theory defederation exists to block bad actors. Since anyone can host a server themselves and no one can stop the servers outside some kind of government intervention, each server needs the ability to block a spammy or even illegal content filled server. In reality, it is used for that and the censorship of ideas server owners don't like... or even just blocking a server because the admins of each server had a spat. It has been likened to little fifedoms each with their own flavor of tyrant, a little drematic imo but not wholely wrong either. Another use is if you want to use the software, but don't want/need connections to the greater network. So you fully defederate and only allow your friends to have logins to your isolated server.

postpawl 3y ago

Creating accounts on multiple websites is something we all do all the time. It’s better than staying with a single rent-seeking site that’s getting increasingly aggressive about monetizing the content provided for free by its users. Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with. Reddit users shouldn’t be happy about a site (and app) that has only gotten worse over the years. It has also never been easier to replace Reddit and Twitter technologically. This is a key opportunity to fight against the enshittification of the internet and you’re on here complaining about creating multiple accounts… Ugh

dash2 3y ago
I predict that not everyone will be furious, even if they should, and that the barriers to entry that GP mentions will indeed be an obstacle to mastodon’s growth, even if you think they shouldn’t.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  inevitably. But it's not about dethroning Twitter/reddit, it's about making an active alternative. Will that barrier be too large? I guess history will tell.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with. 1. Twitter was and still is a commercial product, not to mention publicly traded. Buying and selling it is completely fine and ordinary. It's nothing to feel furious about, especially if you aren't going to put up a competing offer. 2. Wouldn't you (and 99% of people) also spend money to amplify your opinions far and wide if you had such money? Hell, the entire reason most people use social media is because they want to amplify their opinions far and wide.
- postpawl 3y ago
  Almost nobody can afford a competing offer. You’re seriously sticking up for some billionaire who bought what was effectively a public square of the internet to turn it into self promoting crap? Are you also one of those people who said it was going to be great for free speech before he started banning journalists who criticized him?

zorked 3y ago

Federation is its own thing. I use Lemmys and Kbins but I follow the communities from my Mastodon account, so the number of extra accounts I created is zero. It's super-neat, actually.

nxpnsv 3y ago

You don’t need multiple accounts, i can post and follow stuff across the threadiverse from my single account.

rektide 3y ago

Ah yes, the forever cry of fascism. 'Only centralized winner take all systems can ever win. Anything else is surely too difficult & could never ever possibly get anywhere. Because that's what my very important opinion says. Get used to hearing this call friends, it will be repeated verbatim forever, for surely your attempts are futile!' Change doesn't have to come overnight, or even soon. Better is not on a deadline. Society can adapt & improve slowly too, in difficult not easy win struggles. This article is about 0.025% of the planet signing up, mostly within a couple months. To me, one that that ain't bad! The growth trend isn't likely to continue apace but this like critical mass, like a seed successfully germinating, for a long life, that can bring who knows what. But of course overwhelmingly negative doomsaying 'it'll never work' is the tried & true forever response to all efforts to do anything other than a couple centralized megaproperties. Everything is too hard for users at scale. Only bad can win. Resign. Give up. Don't try. Unless you have 3b+ users you shouldn't even try. This is just going to be the same point forever & ever, anytime anything good might possibly happen.

eco 3y ago

I know this point was already made but it really is just email but with your email provider also offering public mailing lists. It kept feeling super complicated until I realized that's all it is. Don't overthink which instance to choose. Just sign up for Lemmy.world or any of the other "general purpose" instance. It's not terribly important. The one caveat to that is that you may want to choose beehaw instead if you strongly value a more heavily moderated experience. As I understand it, Beehaw intends to refederate once there are better moderation tools available on Lemmy but for now they are separated.

donmcronald 3y ago

> No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. Having all the casual users left behind and siloed on Reddit would be glorious. Lol.

throwaway5Am1k 3y ago

>you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site. No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. This is a feature in my opinion. Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit). It's taboo, but gatekeeping communities is absolutely required to stop mass adoption and the downward spiral. Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.

rewmie 3y ago
> This is a feature in my opinion. I tried to join a server. Went through a long list of them. I was confused on which to pick, and if that decision mattered, and what would be the security implications of it. I finally picked one reluctantly. The server was down. Not a great feature. Feels more like a bug. > Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit). Nonsense. Mass adoption means it's the place to go to consume and produce content. If the feature of Lemmy you single out as being better is that no one uses it then I'm not sure what would be the point of joining, or why are you promoting the service so that others join. > Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020. No it wasn't. At best, it was different. And people like me are leaving 2023 Reddit, not 2010 Reddit. What we want is an alternative to today's service, not nostalgia.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
  > I tried to join a server. This is already a failure. There is no need to join unless you find a topic you want participate in. And you event don't have to, you can even use a mastodon (pleroma, friendica, e.t.c.) account if you already have it if you just want to leave a comment in a thread.

darthrupert 3y ago

>No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. From the point of view of active Lemmy users, this is not a problem. Casual users don't contribute, so they're essentially just leeches from the point of view of the overall service. Kinda same thing as with pure FOSS. Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way.

perryizgr8 3y ago
> Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way. Not at all. In fact it is the non contributing users that give value to your product. Imagine Firefox but without any end users. Similarly, reddit is valuable mostly because of the massive number of people viewing content on it. Youtube is valuable because of the huge number of people who just watch videos, never make anything. The content creators, or contributors, will flock to wherever the non contributors are.
- darthrupert 3y ago
  >Imagine Firefox but without any end users. Firefox isn't FOSS in this argument in the way I mean, because they extract actual monetary value from their users.
zajio1am 3y ago
As a FOSS developer, i must say that for me, users as a whole (in contrast to a community around the project) are the primary purpose of developing FOSS. And even if i just looked on non-contributing users in a utilitarian way, they are still useful for project brand recognition.

janandonly 3y ago

The model NOSTR uses is more like what you expect, then. One Private/Public key-pair is all you need to fetch data from, and upload your own posts to all NOSTR relays. The only complicating factor now is that, to prevent spam, some relays [0] are requiring a one time or recurring payment. [0] https://relay.exchange https://relay.exchange

NoboruWataya 3y ago

- No, you don't need to create a separate account for every Lemmy. Federation means you create an account on one instance (that is federated with a lot of other instances) and you can interact with those other instances. - Yes, it takes five minutes of research to figure that out. It might also take another five minutes of research to ensure you don't choose an extremist or troll instance that will get defederated from all the others. Yes, there is friction that wasn't there with Reddit. Convenience is not what Lemmy is optimised for. If you value convenience above all else then it's probably not for you.

etler 3y ago

It being distributed is the whole point. I think the whole thing is intended to slow you down and be more considerate about being a part of a community. Many servers require you to fill out a form explaining why you want to join the server. I think that's a good thing. People online need to slow down and think more deeply before posting and any community that promotes that I'm all for.

basq 3y ago

Reddit was a lot better before the "casual users" showed up so maybe that's a good thing.

rakoo 3y ago

It's always the same comment: X is different from A, therefore X is not a good replacement for A. The whole point of federation is to avoid the problems we're seeing with Facebook, with Instagram, with Reddit, with Twitter: control over your internet content. Not having a mega-corp bent on maximizing profits and using you as a milking cow, but instead have a say and have actual power in how communities are built and managed. It is 100% expected that Lemmy or KBin is different from Reddit. You say that's not a good user experience, but I challenge that assertion: I say it's not a bad UX, but it's a different UX, and you don't want to change. Well, if you don't want to change, stay on Reddit, that's not a problem. But if you're going to investigate what the fediverse is, please learn what it's about, how it's built. Don't expect to find the same old world you know, that's on purpose ! > It makes no sense to me at all You're on HN, a forum where members pride themselves in being intelligent enough to dig around, learn by themselves, be different, hack around. You haven't made efforts understanding how the fediverse works, or why it's different, and your conclusion is _not_ that you should investigate, but that you should complain that it's too different. I don't understand this reasoning. I think an issue in the mentality in this forum is that people mostly expect products, ie a package that is made by an entity and that is served to users. The package is expected to be complete, shiny, wonderful, the entity is expected to do whatever it takes to convince users. It's an asymmetry that is completely opposite to the whole concept of being a hacker, which is supposed to be the H of HN. Here's a good post explaining what the fediverse is about: https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-the-fediverse-5b4ef3f8ed0e https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-... And here are a few links and resources if you want to go deeper: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Yea, I agree. Lemmy isn't getting the casual user because the casual user isn't leaving reddit. So why bother? This isn't to be gatekeeping, but I think trying to hope for some magical, identical reddit but without reddit's BS is both a fever dream and shortsighted. Do you believe Reddit2 to not fall into the same trap as reddit? We'd need something different to prevent that, and different is going to be less intuitive than the familiar. It's fine if you don't want to be in that firsr wave of figuring out how to make different work, others will figure It out and communicate their findings.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Presumably once the network has good replication there will be a number of good ones with all of the content, like newsgroups? They just seem really immature and definitely imperfect.

clnq 3y ago

> Lenny has a major issue (which I think is a fatal flaw) which is that as soon as you go to the site you have to choose a server (of which there are hundreds) and you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site. This is an outstanding advantage. Let Reddit be Reddit with its eternal September and easy access for everyone. Lemmy could build smaller and much more useful and expert communities. If one has something important to share, then finding an instance is no obstacle. If one just wants to mindlessly shitpost, then maybe it's good some social media sites will be worth too much effort for them to sign up. Personally, I would like paid and privacy-respecting social media sites focused on experts in their fields. Much like academic journals, but with modern social media features and for industry experts and enthusiasts as well as academics in a wide variety of fields traditional and not - everyone who is willing to put some effort into what they spend time on. I think that 0 price of entry is unnatural. No one accepts people in their social circles who spend 0 effort on participating in a mutually-beneficial way. And yet on the internet, that's the only kind of social networking most of us can do. So I say it's good we have a tiny test of effort for people who sign up to Lemmy. Socializing with 0 skin in the game is very unnatural and even if it's better in some philosophical way, the human brain hasn't evolved to deal with a massive amount of garbage that this kind of social networking brings. If you want to communicate something to a lot of people, the price of entry should be at least a modicum of effort. And this is not some far-out untested idea, it worked very well in the 90s.

3v1n0 3y ago

> it seems stupid to have to join multiple “Lemmys” and make multiple accounts, this isn’t a good user experience. Actually you only need to join one lemmy instance, then you can just use that for everything. And stuff like https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-lin... would help not to use yours.