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.
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.
- Create account
- interact with community
- ???
- Profit
Terribly difficult
people kept saying similar stuff about Mastodon, and yet, miraculously, its user base somehow keeps growing.
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.
Regarding point 1- if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-
Things would go much smoother!
Pick an instance based on uptime, or hell, create your own instance.
Piling all of the eggs into a single basket is destined to result in failure.
I signed up with lemmy.ca and I regret it. It doesn’t load “all” content very well so I have to hunt to find content. Hopefully they will fix it.
We can only go up from here!
Also, cannot promise my instance is any better, but, your welcome to try it. https://lemmyonline.com/
Its working quite nicely today though.
It’s not an instance problem, it’s a Lemmy sorting/loading/ranking problem. It doesn’t seem to show very well popular posts from other instances like beehaw or lemmy.ml.
Known issue, going to be fixed soon in the 18.0 release. Until then, just gotta sort by new.
if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-
Things would go much smoother!
Somehow I trust the individual instances to self regulate. When an instance thinks it should not grow any further at the moment, it can close for new registrations, and users will naturally flock to others which are still open. I don’t see this as a responsibility of the users, and in case of users completely new to lemmy, I also don’t see how they could make a reliably informed decision.
In all fairness- if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn’t allowing new registrations.
That being said, those instances are overloaded. They have posted multiple threads on the issue already.
if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn’t allowing new registrations.
I think anyways the registration process should be dumbed down. Simple version:
- User sees no instances or servers during registration
- When they click on ‘register’, a random instance (which allows new registrations) is chosen
- There is a small link ‘advanced options’ which allows users to see and choose instances
This would balance the load between instances and make it much easier for newcomers to join.
I realize we were talking about slightly different views. You had a scenario in mind where people try to join a specific instance (for example because someone promoted that specific instance somewhere else), I was talking about https://join-lemmy.org/
That would be awkward in some cases. Say, if a non-Nazi ended up on a Nazi server by random chance.
You’re right, situations can occur. But it’s not a permanent thing. People can make another new account on an instance which they deem suitable after they have familiarized themselves with lemmy by spending some days or weeks in it. Expecting a bloody newcomer to choose a good instance isn’t so far from random choice anyways.
Also tbh, I have little to no interactions with people from my instance. I subscribe to topics I care for regardless of where they are hosted. People like me would hardly notice they share a server with nazis, as each would flock to different communities.
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.
Thank you for finding and writing the words for it.
Both points describe very well what I miss at least in Lemmy like Fediverse platforms.
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.
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.
Frankly just being able to create collections of of communities and label them as a user feature would be nice. No need to actually go any higher then the user level. R$ allows this though they seem to have been hiding the feature more and more. People act as if one interacts with a community as a unit. I for example usually do not. I stay on my subscribed feed mostly. If I could create sub feeds like News or Financial, etc. I would use those too.
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.
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
