Firstly, there is the unstoppable flood of new posts that are added while browsing “All”. Although this doesn’t happen when using the Jerbea app, it sometimes renders “All” unusable in the browser.
This will be resolved once websockets are removed with the next update:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3008
Secondly, the issue of the same posts being displayed for days under “Hot”. There is already a pull request for this, so it has been fixed and just needs to be implemented:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076
Now, the only remaining points for me are:
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Links to external instances should automatically be transformed when opened so that one can participate with the account of their own instance. For example, lemmy.world/c/memes should automatically become feddit.de/c/[email protected].
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Communities from different instances should be able to merge, allowing users to see the content of all communities across different instances.
I posted this in Ask Lemmy but since it didn’t get traction I’m gonna piggyback on the visibility of this thread:
As i learn my way around ActivityPub based services, what stands out to me the most is federation is very much exposed to the users. (That, or I still just haven’t wrapped my head around the architecture details and how they manifest in terms of user experience.)
Am I just misunderstanding this, or would the end-user experience be more fluid and functional if the federation mechanics were mostly ‘under the hood’. What I mean by that is - right now if there’s a community I would enjoy participating in that is located on a different instance, in order to do that I need to (a) know it exists in the first place, (b) know what instance it is on, and (c) explicitly tell my instance about its address in order to join.
Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index? And if something like that existed, couldn’t that push what is an inherently more technical detail to lower levels of the implementation, and make for a simpler UX by allowing every instance to expose a more complete list of communities to users from directly within whatever instance they choose to use?
This is probably the biggest issue I have with Lemmy right now. To make matters worse, it’s really easy to miss how the system works. A lot of new users on smaller instances probably think this place is a ghost town because they don’t see many communities in the directory. It’s not ideal to have to use an external tool to find communities, then extra problematic that the actual process is so awkward: manually pasting the address from the external site in the search bar, then you get a “community not found” warning but ignore that, then the community will appear but it’ll grab the old posts and not the comments. Weird.
I can accept that it would be too much if every single instance defaulted to a full local sync of every other community on every other instance, but they should at least show up in a list when searched for, IMO.
I mean, you dont have to do it personally. Just someone from your server has to tell the local server “hey, im interested. Please give this server a feed” and then everyone on that server now gets a feed. You can also use the community search and just select all and then it will search out and then you can subscribe from that page. It’s basically a master list of communities. For instance https://lemmy.world/search/q/pokemon/type/Communities/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 then everyone on lemmy.world now has to deal with an influx of pokemons…
I might be misunderstanding but it basically works the way you want it to work but in a different way than you want it to work.
The mechanics aren’t always smooth for the first subscription to a community on an instance.
It may make things simpler for the user, but at the cost of storage and performance of every instance in the index, which won’t scale well as more instances are added over time. I personally think it’s better the way it is. As long as you are educated enough to know how to federate with other instances you choose to federate with, you can keep your own instance minimally connected to only the instances and communities you actually care about.
Maybe a good compromise would be for such an idea as a globally replicated index, to be optional, so individual instances could keep it disabled if they wanted to. If you choose to enable it as an instance owner, the pain points for your end users go away, at the cost of performance and other potentially negative side-effects. If you choose to keep it disabled, you can still federate with any instances you want, but you won’t participate in the index. Or maybe your instance would be listed and replicated to other instances’ indexes, but your own instance won’t receive updates as the global index continues to grow. Since it would just be for convenient discoverability, there’s not really any problem with that. No functionality would be lost for your or any other instance.
Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index?
Sure, this and anything else is possible as long as people have the motivation and knowledge to pursue and implement it.
Something similar to DNS standards could work for Fediverse sites. In fact, why not piggyback on DNS like the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and even openpgp4fpr / KeyOxide standards. DNS itself fulfills the first two requirements:
- Some form of “master index” - check! ✅
- Replicated across “instances” - check! ✅ … in a sense …
- If you consider: Zone Transfer /
AXFRa form of “replication” - If you consider DNS servers a “node” / “instance”… rather than just a Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse “instance”
For the second point about DNS zone transfer… it used to be the case that anyone could issue the
AXFRrequest to a DNS server. However, this basically dumps all the records on a DNS server’s zonefile for that domain. So, it’s often disallowed nowadays because it discloses all hosts in the zone file, some of which might be considered private by the domain owner. Instead, server admins usually configure this to only be allowed by trusted IP addresses of other hosts. (I guess it’s a very crude form of “web of trust” based on IP allow lists and the whims of a SysAdmin.)Maybe the Fediverse has use for piggybacking on DNS via TXT records for some use cases. However, it’s likely that some other decentralized method of replication might be invented specifically for federation with other ActivityPub servers.
Am I just misunderstanding this, or would the end-user experience be more fluid and functional if the federation mechanics were mostly ‘under the hood’.
I know what you mean, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Look at the recent beehaw-defederation drama. This would have been totally intransparent if the whole federation thing would be something that’s only running behind the curtains.
Links to external instances should automatically be transformed
100% agree. Getting linked to other instances where I’m not signed in is a really clunky experience. It seems like that’s been happening less since I got on the Jerboa app (or maybe I’m just clicking on less links)
What do you mean with
This will be resolved once websockets are removed with the next update
I hope it wont be removed throughout the software since its really refreshing to see updates in realtime, be it Upvotes/Downvotes, Comments, Posts etc.
If you want that functionality use new. Hot and active are for posts that are popular not for flooding the top of my screen with random posts.
Yeah your suggestions and a few more are absolutely necessary to make this a viable platform. I don’t think Lemmy or any other alternative is in a reliable enough state right now and almost everyone will just go back to reddit soon. But maybe in a year or so, who knows, depending on the devs (who seem to have questionable takes so I’m not too optimistic).
Atm i like lemmy more , it feels more free and fresh , doesnt feel like i need to expect a removal / censoring from a mod or a filter at every post or comment like on reddit.
FOSS will keep on improving, and proprietary software will keep on getting worse.
Both would keep exiating. I imagine it like a federation on the community level. [email protected] could federate with [email protected] and when you view one of the two, you would see the contents of both as if they were one community. When creating a post you would still need to decide to which of both you want to post it, though. This would make sure that there are no problems in the case of “defederation”.
That’s how I imagine the whole thing. Not sure if there are any negative side effects I can’t think of right now, though.
Secondly, the issue of the same posts being displayed for days under “Hot”. There is already a pull request for this, so it has been fixed and just needs to be implemented:
Adding the “hide” feature from reddit would be an easy fix/stopgap solution. I had a similar issue in reddit when one of my multis included a less active community, so I’d just hide the posts I was done with.
This is good news, I’m still having trouble getting my homepage to stop showing repeated posts. Also, it’s all fediverse Reddit migration related stuff because it seems to be overriding the popularity of anything else. I’m not sure these algorithms are doing what they are supposed to, as it was my understanding that it should attempt to show a more balanced view of your subscribed communities.
The developers are doing an amazing job! So much respect for you and the time you are committing! It feels so much more human and homely here, if that makes sense
How would merging communities across different instances? Would one be chosen as the new primary, and the other goes away?
Merging communities might be hard, but maybe redirecting a community to another instance? this would also allow people to move communities from one instance to another, which would allow large communities to have dedicated instances, or to consolidate related communities under the same instance.
Allowing communities to exist across multiple instances is going to be a nightmare now that I think about it, like how will moderation work? I can already see it becoming a new way to spam. Create your own lemmy instance, spam a post, and make it so that no one can delete it. It’ll cause instances to disable open federation, which would mean we’ll end up with only a few allowed instances
should be fairly easy: send invite to same community on other instance, after merge instances will sync community, moderators will merge.
But this might bring other problems
That’s destroying the whole point of federation, at that point you might as well have everything on one website
I think multi reddits (which are a highly requested feature now) could be used as a decent compromise.
Basically imagine users can group communities together into one mini-feed. This could be used for similar communities across multiple instances, like [email protected] and [email protected]. Call them multi-lemmies or subscription groups or web rings or whatever.
Then, what if moderators could cooperate create their own recommended feeds that users can subscribe to? Maybe even put a link to it next to the “Subscribe” link in the sidebar. If users of both communities are encouraged to sign up for the multi-lemmy, then everybody can see everybody else’s content in one combined feed without having to cross-post.
Posts are still hosted on their home instance, so there’s no extra work for moderators except over agreeing which other communities can join the ring. If a user doesn’t want to see a particular community for whatever reason, they can still subscribe/unsubscribe to specific communities like before. That way we get the best of both federation and similar communities sharing content.
Communities from different instances should be able to merge, allowing users to see the content of all communities across different instances.
Holy crap this is huge news. There are quite a few subs I browse that seem to have fragmented into multiple different instances. Would be great to see those all merge together into one feed.
Sorry if my wording was not clear, but that’s just a wish of mine, not some planned feature!
Might want to edit your post then, I misunderstood it too
