this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
291 points (99.3% liked)
Fediverse
28490 readers
572 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Non-techie here. It's true. I have no idea how !instance.domain/community works.
I understand that I'm on an island. Lemmy.World is a pretty big island, kinda like Austrailia, but it is still an island.
I can't just go to otherinstance.otherdomain/community and click subscribe. Or comment. Or anything. That instance should know I'm Lost_My_Mind@Lemmy.World just by the fact that I'm still logged into Lemmy.World, even if I'm on Lemmy.ml
So if I go to any other instance, I shouldn't have to do a thing.
As long as I'm not banned from Lemmy.ml, and as long as Lemmy.ml hasn't defederated from Lemmy.World, I should be able to log in on Lemmy.World, travel to Lemmy.ml, and immediately be able to comment, upvote, downvote, subscribe, whatever. And when I do these things, even though I'M on Lemmy.ml, my actions will have come from Lemmy.World
Lemmy/The Fediverse is a great idea. It has a lot of foundationally sound ideas that should be able to continue to thrive for decades. It just needs a userbase.
I remember in 2000 saying the same things about linux......and it never got that userbase until Android took all the techie sound ideas, and put them behind the curtain. When 16 year old blond valley girl Britney uses her Android phone, she doesn't know what a terminal is. She doesn't have to know. She doesn't have to think about it. She just opens her app drawer and plays spotify. And thats it.
I know the concept of a techie platform hiding the techie advancements sounds completely foreign to the idea of someone who spent 3 years learning how to techie, but thats what needs to happen.
Otherwise Britney will get about two sentences into you explaining the fediverse, before her brain turns off.
If Britney can't use it, this will have a userbase to reddit, in the same way that Linux has a userbase compared to Mac/Windows.
Lenny can grow. I feel like the ideas here are built to last. They just need to be more accessable to idiots. I have other issues I feel could be fixed, but I think this one is by far the biggest barrier to entry for most.
You make great points. I think this should be one of the top goals for frontend Lemmy devs. Most users are not super technical. The fediverse (lemmy included) should work with minimal friction to be accessible.
If you're open to it, I'd love to get your feedback on my Lemmy frontend's onboarding and overall user experience. I've been trying to make it simple, effective, and accessible. I can DM you!
I'd argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just...Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they're not going to understand.
Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don't feel "fit", and that's their right.
But ultimately I don't believe the user's experience should suffer for that. If admins don't want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that's where the front ends and apps should come in.
Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more...well, unified. I don't believe I should have to care about what instance I'm looking at Lemmy "from", I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I've subscribed to.
I know that's a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list "see this community as moderated by ______"?)
But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can't make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.
A lot of this doesn't work easily on the activitypub model, because accounts and posts and communities live on their host instances, and every interaction has to be relayed to them and updates have to be retrieved from them.
While you can set up mirrors with arbitrary additional moderation that can be seen from everywhere, you can't support submission of content from instances blocked by the host instance.
The bluesky model with content addressing can create that experience by allowing the creation of "roaming" communities where posts and comments can be collected by multiple hosts who each can apply their own filtering. Since posts are signed and comment trees use hashes of the parent you can't manipulate others' posts undetected.
Bluesky already has 3rd party moderation label services and 3rd party feed generators for its Twitter-like service, and a fork replicating a forum model could have 3rd party forum views and 3rd party moderation applied similarly.