Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
I don’t get argument about duplicates. The same situation was on reddit - you’ve got few, sometimes more, subs about same topic. You could subscribe to whichever you wanted. Why on Lemmy this is suddenly a problem?
I think users are still having trouble with the mental model for browsing Lemmy.
The first interaction with the service is already fragmented - you need to choose where to create an account and start browsing. Even though you can browse communities from other servers, people are now seeing them through the lens of “fragmented” “my server vs other server” and that creates the illusion that these duplicates are somehow a huge issue.
But duplicates can actually be quite useful - a community called “memes” on Lemmy.world could attend to a different audience than a community also called “Memes” but made in an instance entirely in French.
Also, if two instances have two communities you enjoy, with the same name… Subscribe to both? Nothing stops you from doing that. It’s okay. Reddit had “me_irl” and “meirl” which were the exact same, but with different mods, a relatively similar number of subscribers and quite honestly the same content. I didn’t know the actual difference between the two, and I still do not know - I just subscribed to both and kept getting depressing memes to cry before going to sleep. No issues.
Are there ways to manage lists of such? For example, on the former platform that doesn’t deserve a call out, you can do “me_irl+meirl” and aggregate both into one feed. This makes reading the (albeit potentially cross posted) content in a unified feed much easier.
Another similar point I’m having a hard time getting over is that with a centralized platform, it is easy to go to “Subject A”, and see everything on that subject. However, now I need to see “Subject A@lemmy.world”, “Subject A@lemmy.ml”, “Subject A@someother.instance”… Yes, I could subscribe to them all, but this ultimately end up creating a noisy home feed with also “Subject B@lemmy.world”, “Subject B@lemmy.ml”, “Subject C@lemmy.world”, “Subject D@lemmy.ca”, … etc. all baked into one feed, as opposed to just something focused on “Subject A”.
Lastly, discoverability leaves a lot of room for desire. Today, I’m fairly new to Lemmy, I am actively seeking out communities that I might be interested in, across multiple popular instances, and hoping that federation is enabled between the two instances. Tomorrow, I’d find that I’m subscribed to too many (see the noisy main feed issue above), and I’d remove a bunch. Next week, am I likely to go to the Join Lemmy directory to find new instances, and add “duplicate” communities from newly popular instances? I think not.
I think the long term survival of the platform (to expand beyond just us tech nerds that hate the former platform) will depend a lot on streamlining this workflow to make content discovery much more consistent. Even a simple option where a pseudo “!Community@” (with no instance) feed that aggregates all the “!Community” regardless of instance that you’ve subscribed to, might go a long way.
Discovery really has been the biggest drawback for me. The r/system combined with wikis and sidebars made it very easy to find interesting things.
That’s lacking in lemmy so far. Which, it isn’t a bad thing, barriers to entry have benefits. But from a user perspective, trying to replace reddit, the difficulty in navigating and finding things is frustrating.
But I’m coming from reddit, and they aren’t meant to be the same. The issues are part of what makes it next to impossible for what happened there to happen in a federated system. And I’m so fucking sick of corporate bullshit ruining good things . I figure that lemmy will catch up in feature parity soon enough, and there’s bound to be apps that make it easier to use at some point.
I just wish I had the resources to run a server myself.
Well, by just searching topics in the search bar you can typically find instances related to the search. You need to click the “chain” icon rather than the “federated star” icon to view the post “from your instance” and stay on your personal account.
Woah. I’ve been clicking the star the whole time. This may make things a looot easier.