Lemmy needs two things to be successful
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.
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.
Lemmy needs two things to be successful:
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.
Terribly difficult
Thank you for that insightful comment. You've really addressed my point in its entirety, and thoroughly proven me to be a dullard. I submit to your vast intelligence.
I mean ...
That's active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.
So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.
One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don't think it's right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren't.
Twelve of those are mine, due partly to the very shortcomings being discussed here.
The reality is that reddit still exists, and is still more user-friendly (and that's a low bar). It's great that lemmy is getting this bump, but it won't last unless we make it easy to switch for most people. If lemmy was good enough to be a reddit alternative already, it would be. But it's not, and the only reason people are here is because of the protest.
I think I'm just not that worried about making it easy for "most people" right now. The nature of open source projects means that enthusiastic users can and do contribute to infrastructure, and as more people come along, more people will start working on making things better. There's a reason reddit decided to fuck over third party API calls, and its because open source projects became better than their own shit, and they apparently think that they're losing potential money because of it. Projects like Apollo would not be getting cut off if they weren't seen as a threat to reddit's business model. If lemmy survives, the breadth and depth of community driven infrastructure will outpace reddit eventually. If it doesn't, well... then somebody will try something else. No biggie. Cool shit takes time to build.
That makes total sense. I hope to contribute sometime :)
Yep – it shouldn't have to take a mass exodus from reddit with a specific push for Lemmy/kbin to get these registrations. Without the support of so many other people doing it, most wouldn't have had the initiate to figure it out, I suspect. Improving accessibility and user friendliness will be important for sustained growth when reddit protests are finished or shut down by admins.
We're mostly on the same page. reddit will continue to exist (although time will tell in which state).
I got hung up on the statement "It won’t get more users if it continues to be difficult to use", because it is evidently false, unnuanced. I still want lemmy to implement these features, as it would help growth (and mostly, the individual users) even further.
It is a somewhat reductive statement, I'll give you that, but I think the core idea is true. Most people will go to the easiest solution. Lemmy's userbase may continue to grow for some time, but it will not reach anywhere close to the level of reddit. I think it's foolish to point to the trends from the last week and try to draw conclusions about the future, as this is clearly an extraordinary circumstance.
Yes, for sure. Maybe we simply have different standards about truthful statements. I did not mean to imply lemmy could grow like that forever. I just pointed out that it does in a moment when you said it could not, that's all.
In what way is reddit more user-friendly?
One account gives you access to all the communities?
Years of UI/UX development (arguably, both are bad, but still more developed than anything Lemmy has)?
Easily navigate a user's post- and comment history?
Space for more specialised communities due to larger user base?
More, and more experienced, mods due to larger user base?
I'm sure we could play this game all day. I guess it depends on whether you see each instance as an individual "Reddit", or see Lemmy as a fractured "Reddit" with big chasms that need separate accounts to be successfully bridged.
Personally, I see Lemmy as potentially being the latter. Having one Lemmy account (or maybe even one ActivityPub account) would allow me to subscribe to the communities I'm interested in, without having to worry about whether those communities are federated with each other. The instance mods can still de/federated how they feel they need to, in order to make their mod tasks manageable.
If BeeHaw still wants a manual application process for vetting purposes, it shouldn't matter if I'm asking for permission to create an account, or asking for permission to bring in my already existing account. Instance mods can still gatekeep to the exact level that they want.
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.
Yup exactly. How do you define successful anyway? It's say that Lemmy is already successful and it's likely to continue to grow.
It's unlikely Lemmy will ever be more successful than Reddit, but it doesn't need to be.
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.
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.
That sounds highly inconvenient from a end user experience if I'm honest. As a predominantly mobile user having to have multiple accounts set up in app and remembering to change to the right one for each instance will get old quickly.
The problem is that Lemmy is being mentioned in hackernews reddit and elsewhere as a potential alternative. Not as an alternative with all those caveats in framing but just so.
Communicating what it is even more boldly might be useful (I know it's been done quite a lot in long self posts but that I'm not sure how much of that goes through)
100% agreed with both. Especially DIDs just need to happen on all ActivityPub platforms. It will not only free users from being locked to an instance, but it will also allow instances to be much more flexible in scaling their capacity. Lemmy.ml is overloaded because they have too many users, and anyone who signed up there can no longer use their account. DID would allow them to immediately use their account from any small or large instance with spare capacity without changing the experience. The same would go for Mastodon.
It sounds like a moderation nightmare having people come over to your instance with a whole lot of content they've created that are now being hosted by your servers. You've got to look through the whole thing to make sure it is not breaking TOS of your instance. Doesn't sound great to me.
The most straightforward way of resolving #1 (for those so inclined to resolve it) is to host your own instance. Your "identity" becomes the right-side of the @ rather than the left.
I don't see why the content they've created would have to go along with. You could keep the content on the server, but have the posting user be offsite, like posting to another service/community. If the user has moved off your server, just alter the local profile to point to their "new" location.
It would be less overhead than moving the physical posts themselves, especially if things get bigger later on.
There’s many different ways DID could be implemented on top of ActivityPub. I don’t think full content replication (what you’re mentioning) is likely as that’s a fundamentally different style of protocol.
But I can imagine signing in to a different instance with my ID, at which point I subscribe to all my communities from this instance and get notifications if someone replies to one of my comments etc. Just as if I had created an account on this instance and had posted from there. It just means “your” instance can go down and you can continue future interactions mostly uninterrupted from another instance.
And it’s more useful in the case of microblogging, where with DID you can publish posts from any instance and your followers will see them. No need for a manual account migration or anything.
Oh I see, that could be better. I still don't think it's necessary, but it's better.
Depending on the implementation, I feel that DIDs across ActivityPub could make the aspect of interoperability between different services much more appealing as well. While I think it's interesting that we can directly interact with posts from entirely different services like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, and Friendica, I find it difficult to make the feature make sense for daily usage beyond the convenience of not having to open another site/client for a singular interaction. I feel like it makes sense if you only prefer a single service/format for accessing content, but every software implementation handles content differently, with differing formats, features, and limitations. They each specialize at accessing and presenting the fediverse in their own ways, so there's reason to use each individual application. If you still have to make a separate account for both instances to interact when using either of them, I feel that defeats the purpose of the interconnectivity aspect. By being able to connect the same account to instances between different software, I think this would strengthen it.
Yes, exactly! It's good for everyone.
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.
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.
lmao I thought I was dumb for not understanding despite having a BS in CS. Distributed systems are just inherently confusing (and I took distributed systems in college!). Definitely gonna be something that I contribute to on github though, it's just a matter of time before I learn what I need to learn
Counter strike?
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.
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
Being able to download your own data would be a start
I agree completely! And thanks for clearing up the disassociative identity disorder question, because I actually was wondering for a second. 😆
But if #1 is too hard, the ability to download all of your data from a login and possibly upload it to another account would be a good stopgap.
Yes, I think there are other alternatives to accomplish a similar goal. It may be that lemmy will build in its own syncing of some kind. The method doesn't really matter much to me.
Good point. That would be a great feature
I don't see the big problem in 1. Compare it to e-mail. If you want to switch provider you have to backup and restore your emails if you want to.
Nobody bats an eye that amiladresses contain a maildomain but with Lemmy everyone is used to the reddit way. Give it some time, people will get used to it.
The syncing and federation problems we are experiencing right now will get solved in the future, people will get used to the new naming scheme.
Point 2 is a great idea btw.
Notice how everyone pretty much uses gmail? If gmail goes down you lose access to everything, but it won't because it's google and they have money to throw at problems. That's not true for Lemmy (and we don't want that because it leads to Reddit 2.0 where all power is centralized).
There is also the additional issue of defederation, not just your instance stability. Like if you happen to be one of the 30k users on lemmy.world, or any of the smaller ones that got cut off from Beehaw because you trusted the "it doesn't matter where you make your account, it's all shared in the fediverse!" - if there's a constant risk Gmail decides to block all Hotmail users one day, creating a Gmail account in the first place seems like the safer bet.
Absolutely! Don't fool yourself into thinking this will be the only time this happens. Some instance owners will never be willing or able to manage their servers as well as the big players, and that means bad actors can creep into other instance through them!
Email servers getting blocked is definitely a thing that happens otherwise your inbox would be nothing but spam and email providers make sure that their users don't spam or they would get blacklisted by other providers. Email is inherently federated.
Back in the early 2000s it was still possible to run a mail server locally on a dialup line and have big mail servers accept emails saying "yo the return address for this is myaccount@bigmail.com", not using bigmail's outgoing servers, you can absolutely forget about doing that now. Back in those days I would also have 200+ spam mails per day, the situation was so untenable that nowadays you can't even get an email account without included spam filter unless you set up your own server.
Lemmy and the overall fediverse is not really in that situation yet, where actual commercial spammers make it a target, and the smaller hiccups and maybe a bit trigger happy beehaw admins just mean that when the shit deluge finally arrives, we'll have the tools to deal with it.
Email providers aren't likely to shut down. But from what I know instances may.
@someguy3
@DaughterOfMars @this_is_router
Large email providers aren't likely to shut down, but smaller ones might... which is the concern for users on instances. Having a way to export / import one's account to a new instance would be ideal; not sure how a decentralized ID might work but it would be exciting to have.
When moving to another mail provider, I can forward mails going to the old address to the new one.
When moving to another lemmy account (technically creating an unconnected second one), I have no way to be notified of replies to posts or comments I made with the old account.
There are a couple other use cases where the comparison doesn't really hold. My hopes are on Moving user profile to a new instance #1985, but it probably won't be implemented any time soon.
You're assuming that the reason for the move is not the old mail provider shutting down. If the old provider shuts down and you cannot somehow get their domain name, all mails sent to your old address will just vanish in the void (or even worse, be gobbled up by whoever owns the domain now, better hope there's no personal info in there that you wouldn't want in their hands).
But, is there a way to backup and restore? For example, in invididious (Hope devs keep it up with the hard work) you can export all your data to an OPML or json and import it in another instance. For mail it can be done through IMAP.
Taking an opportunity to post a lil off-topic because somecritter's finally supporting a touch of calm around here: yesss, give it some time, people. Give yourselves some time. Let things (and people) settle some before judging and pushing in every direction at once.
[General comment, not directed at anycritter in particular] It's getting kinda tiring that so many people are in a big huge rush around here expecting everything to be some form of "just right" right now. People don't seem to be giving themselves or others time to figure out what's going on, how things work, how things should work, and there's a ton of excitement and pushing for things to go this way or that way or whatever but most of them don't even seem to know what this place is, what federation means, how things work here, or even what instance they're on or posting to at any given moment. There's a lot going on that needs time to play out and it's not all going to be obvious to everycritter immediately.
This place (what should it even be called? This one is looking forward to having a useful name for federated-not-Reddit-thing :'D ) doesn't need to replace Reddit right now. There is time to work out what it is, what it can be, and what it should be. A bit of patience will enable sensible progress.
Point 1 is part of why I'm gonna start self-hosting a Lemmy instance at some point. If I host my own instance then I can back up my data and ensure it's never lost.
1- You mean something along the lines of Hubzilla's nomadic identities? or how?
2- This is a good Idea. But I'm not sure how posible it is as of now
I'm not familiar with Hubzilla, but it sounds like one possible solution!
I've never used Hubzilla or its cousin project friendica. But I know nomadic identity is a unique feature of the former.
For what I've read, it allows you to keep your friends and content that are also hosted on hubzilla, but any person from another platform you follow would be lost (you'll have to re-follow) if you move instances through nomadic identity.
Putting a hypothetical lemmy nomadic identity as an example, If you move from a lemmy intance to another using clones, any community you subscribe to that's based on lemmy will remain, but any kbin magazine you subscribe to would have to be re-subscribed
NFTs
Eh?
It's a joke. You could have your account tied to an NFT. Then transfer it to another instance if you want.
Federation is not reliably delivering comments and other Lemmy content between servers. People need to be looking for such problems, so far there isn't any tool to observe or track this problem.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3101
This is just a sad lol.
DID are kinda against the idea itself also a lot less private.
For the second one there is an issue on github discussing it.
And there is another issue related to the first one. Not exactly the same, but being able to truly move to another home instance would do it for me.
That sounds exciting. Would be a fantastic addition to the fediverse.
Just to add a little more context, here’s the W3C recommendation for DID:
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
Lemmy needs me to be able to login.....Let's start with the basics.
I think point two is interesting, but only if the communities choose too. One of the interesting promises of federation is that you can have competing communities with different interests. I can completely see commerical interests hosting a server (e.g the NBA or NFL) that has strong brand identity as a place to interact with stars, and then the un-branded fan sites. IMO, the competition is what makes the Fediverse interesting, and seeing that play out is fascinating.
I think it should just be a special view in the UI which would combine them how the reader wants it, it should not have anything to do with the communities themselves.
It's kind of assumed they would have to pick which communities to federate with. How would you propose doing that automatically 😂
I don't think these are such a big deal. Point 2 is cool, and sounds somewhat feasible if there's will, but I'd like to hear how you'd go and implement the first one. It's a lot of work for not much benefit that I can see.
I think there's a third big thing: really good UX. I don't have an Android phone, so I don't know about Jerboa, but the web interface ... could use some work. I know the bug with new posts pushing the feed down is on track to be fixed soon, but wow, it can be really quite bad. iOS apps are getting way better quickly, too, but overall they're nascent.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but additionally, I think the ranking algorithm(s) could use some work. I can see there's tons of content, if I sort by new, but sorting by active results in stale posts, and sorting by hot doesn't seem to quite hit the sweet spot on tenured/good quality content vs. newness. The recent ranking bug(s) haven't helped matters there either.
yep, the default sorting makes it looks like nothing has been posted for 3 days
At least for now always sorting by new is very pleasant.
You can create a one-person instance and hold your identity there.
If you what you want is for every server to hold your identity, you have to trust all servers. I think that an evil admin would be able to impersonate any user from any instance if that were the case. How do you delete your account? Can an any admin delete your account everywhere? Which one is the real "you"?
I would assume the same way any other system with untrusted nodes works: with the client authenticating by use of a cryptographic signature on everything they submit.
This is very true. At some point someone has to hold your account info. A DID just means another 3rd party or otherwise, holds your account which can also go down or become lost. Hosting your own account is the best for the health of the fediverse also.
Been exploring, setting up my account, learning to use lemmy since 2am, this is the fundamental issue in facing, one that I cannot seem to wrap my head around.
I'm not sure (someone can correct me if I'm wrong) if my account is in certain instance, I can subscribe to communities in that instance, or other external instances. However, subscribing to communities in other instances is pretty tedious. I still don't know how to reliably do it on PC let alone mobile. It's a toss up for me if it'll open in my account or a new page asking me to log in to that instance.
Hopefully in the coming months lemmy can take off and we can have something amazing on our hands
You can subscribe to any content anywhere as long as neither instance is on the other's block list. If your instance hasn't federated with the other instance yet, then you need to do that thing where you search for "!community@instance" and wait a few minutes. Otherwise, you just go to that community while on your home instance (e.g. for you, "mander.xyz/c/community@instance") and click subscribe.
Heck, you don't even need to enter the community in the
! Lcommunity@instanceformat. Simply copy pasting the community url likehttps://lemmy.world/c/communitynameto the search field works as well.TIL. I guess they must have improved it recently. That's one of the worst parts about starting on a smaller instance for sure. Being able to copy+paste the URL from its source is really helpful.
I think number 1 is important so it’s easier to move. Otherwise we could feel centralized to one instance rather than feeling free to federate
I like your points.
Short term they need to work on the "all front page". It doesn't seem to give me popular posts from all instances, it's full of 2 to 3 to 4 day old posts that were never very popular. I have to manually go around (like to this community) to find content.
@DaughterOfMars
For #1 - ive thought about that.
My thought would be something like a small LDAP type server. Self-hostable. You make a user like myuser@mydomain.net and its honored as a log in for the various fediverse stuff.
So like it could hold the subsciptions for the communities on the various threadiverse servers you connect to localy, and when you open say lemmy.ml, part of the info sent for your user would be a list of communities you are subscibed to on lemmy.ml.
If it just handles the user auth, then it could also be a user auth for other fedivers stuff too. PixelFed, and Mastodon, etc. Each service could have its own sub section of the user object's info.
You would still probably end up with a "home" instance you would use, but if that home instance becomes untenable, or goes away, then you would just pick a new instance and log in there with your myuser@mydomain.net account.
Im not a good enough dev to code it, but thats my idea anyway.
You can kind of do something like this already. You are able to host a small instance of your preferred fediverse software and create an account on it. I don't know if I really like the approach or not, but it's something I've thought about recently.
I don't understand the first one, why would we want that? Wouldn't it be enough to make it possible to move accounts similar to how mastodon does it (but including your local content)?
My bigger problem is that if a instance goes down then the community is gone. I like how Matrix has solved it that you can have aliases and the content gets replicated on other servers, etc. Then even if people defederate then you still have your old copy and people can keep using it.
The need for decentralised identities stems from the same problem you are describing in your second paragraph. A decentralised identity would imply that your content will also stay if the instance goes down. I don't really know however if there is a feasible way to implement this. An easier solution to me seems to be to enable account backups that can be used to recreate your account on a different instance.
Decentralized Identity could be implemented relatively easily just by allowing users to enter a their public key, like in git or PGP. How to sync the data is a different matter though. Maybe you can enter a username (e.g. @user@instance) in your instance's search field and have it federated to your account there if the cryptographic signature matches?
I think #1 is a great idea, but it would take a lot of work and would probably be a pain to phase-in and phase-out across all platforms, but I do think it's a good idea, at least to offer as an option. While I am loathe to mention anything cryptocurrency and NFT-related, creating a simplified distributed ledger and smart contract system that would propagate through federated communities seems like an interesting idea. Alternatively, creating a way for users to specify their other usernames on other servers in a small bio in a profile page could be a possible compromise.
Your point #2 also sounds great, but I don't think this should be allowed between communities on defederated instances, because there's laws in many countries that can classify the act of hosting/providing certain content to be criminal. Therefore, if say if server_a resides in country_a, and country_a allows piracy, and server_b in country_b, and country_b considers it a criminal act to propagate certain information about piracy, the server_a/piracy and server_b/piracy might have different restrictions to discuss piracy. However, a less-informed mod may attempt to federate server_a/piracy and server_b/piracy, and insodoing accidentally make the owner/host of server_a unknowingly complicit in a criminal act.
I'm not a lawyer, and of course this is not intended to be legal advice, but I think that the effort would better be spent on implementing a solution to the decentralized identity problem, than the de-fragmentation of similar communities.
One other nugget to consider, assuming we were to replace Reddit, and the sum of the users on the fediverse were to achieve similar numbers to Reddit's glory days--we would definitely be scraped for AI training data. By keeping the communities fractured, that makes it far more difficult for a company to easily scrape all the information needed. While it might be trivial right now, in the ideally decentralized structure that the fediverse would take, it would take a lot more requests for a server to chase out every strand on every network.
Perhaps in this sense, it might be wise for instances to allow specific community defederation(ie, where server_a and server_b are federated, but server_a does not allow server_b/piracy to propagate(this may already be possible, IDK)), but I do not think it would be wise to allow community to community federation.
TL;DR: #1 is a great idea, OP, and it could be implemented in a simplified distributed ledger that propagates through federated communities, and uses a simplified smart-contract--or the problem could be solved by a compromise that allows users to specify their usernames for other instances in a small public bio. Addressing #2, this could cause legal problems in specific scenarios, rather it is more important for any instance to be able to disallow the propagation of specific communities from a federated server (if this isn't already possible).
The Fediverse in general needs federated identities, preferrably self-sovereign. Something like nostr, with validation signatures. E.g., you own your ID, and validate it with some mechanism of your preference. If midwest.social trusts your validator, it creates a space for your ID.
I don't think this is conceptually or implementationally difficult, but it would require a well written standard and consider both privacy issues (for users) and protections against spammers and bad actors (for hosting providers). I don't thing PGP's web-of-trust model would be a bad one. I think using the nostr network (quasi online chain) would be a great idea, and all of the parts are there; it would need a decent UI and support in each Fedi server implementation - which would be the biggest hurdle.
This would address the DID issue, and I agree with you that this is issue #1. Right now, users don't own their identities: their hosting service does. If midwest.social chose to, they could nuke my account and the canonical source of truth for all my posts. I run my own ActivityPub server and so own the account I use for Mastodon; and, perhaps, someday Fediverse federation will evolve to the point where I can use that account for everything. But it's an expensive node for me to operate, and not everyone can run their own server. Better, self-sovereign, and truly federated DIDs is incredibly important.
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.
That's the issue though. Without a locked identity on an instance, people will naturally choose the option they think is least likely to disappear in a few weeks.
Instances won't appear and disappear weekly. Maybe right now, but not in a few weeks or months from now. The dust just needs to settle.
Every service with open protocols that isn't centralized does the same and nobody has a problem with it, be it bulletin boards, IRC server or mail. You have multiple instances and can't use a service when your instance is down. Thats why we are using the bigger ones and don't run mailservers on our own. It is important that we could though.
We might disagree but I feel this is more a problem of getting used to it. In the end, we all want a decentralized solution, don't we? Having multiple instances is just a part of the fediverse, that's a pro not a con in my book.
No, that will always be happening. The only thing that will settle is that the trusted instances will become known and people will stop signing up for less trusted ones.
An instance closing is not as common as you think it is. And a good way for it not to happen is to not "saturate" the same three intances by registering only in them and chose smaller instances instead. Or, if you have the time and ability, create your own instance.
Many of the instances that close do so because they become too big for the admins to handle.
Do you really think the average person knows or cares about that? No, of course not. They will congregate on the most populous instance so long as it continues to support the traffic.
Then there should be more threads to make newcommers aware of this thing. That (to avoid relatively large intances) is one of the first things I learn when I had my first account on mastodon around 2018. It's common knowledge in other platforms and something that was explained to twitter refugees that came to mastodon and other microblogging fediverse project last year.
you don't have to join big intances to interact with the fediverse. Sometimes smaller intances have better and bigger federation than larger ones, which are often defederated from many instances over their problems moderating their users
I would agree with that.
Wonder if it would be possible to implement a PKI system, so that way, a user can download a private certificate, which would allow them to re-authenticate to their existing account, on a new server anytime they wanted to move around.
Edit- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3164
It could help too if maybe on the sign up page, if an instance is getting full, they suggest some instances that are less full to join. That way people can be guided without having to do research on their own (before they’ve even decided to commit to the fediverse)
The problem is nobody knows which smaller instances will stick around and which won't.
For sure. But beehaw in a good example of aggressive moderating (which is totally their right) that can limit growth and why a decentralized approach is necessary. There can’t be a single massive place for x content. It’s rife for abuse. Allow it to be categorized and decentralized where beehaw can contribute but in their own way and users outside of beehaw can index and participate with them and even other instances that maybe beehaw defederated.
I don't think it's fair to call it "Aggressive Moderation". It's barely possible to moderate on Lemmy right now at all, and that's why they defederated. They simply cannot trust outside instances as much as their own, because they screen every user, and they can't keep up with moderation. Defederating is their only option until mod tools get better.
I mean. It’s clearly subjective and I’m not judging whatsoever. It’s their prerogative and frankly I think there are some positives to it. And if it helps their space then that’s all that matters. I’m just a control freak and want to be in control of my account, backups, location etc.
But if you weren’t one that’s a troll on one of these others and were cut off it’s a tough pill too. I get there’s no easy answer.
When I looked at the mod log I was seeing some instances where, imho, it seemed aggressive policing of symantics. Individuals were t necessarily being offensive or trolling, though their opinions may not have been well formed or fully thought out or in line with others there and were bounced. And again that’s their call.
I’m not saying I would do better. In fact it’s why I’m not open and EVEN if I open my instance I’m not gonna have communities. I have no interest in policing fools that argue in bad faith or just want to get their jollies off angering others.
Beehaw did nothing that isn't common in the fediverse. I know people that are new to all this may be shocked by Beehaw's decision, but defederating from intances that promote intolerant discourses or allow trolling is the way to keep an instance alive. People will end up suspecting and defederating from an instance that interacts with intances that allow or promote that type of content or behaviour.
Again. Its not a criticism of beehaw. Just kind of an example of you are who you associate with sometimes IRL, but in the fediverse. Its unfortunate for some honest folks that may have been bit in the crossfire, but given the options..it is what it is. And I understand why they are building what they are. I support that.
Its also a reason why having very large concentrated communities can be bad and why federation or de-centralization is important. But with that, it does appear we need some better tools for cross-instance moderation and cross-instance community grouping so that you can say...create a "technology multi-community" that includes technology@beehaw.org and technology@lemmy.ml and apple@whateverinstance.com or whatever etc. etc.
That would allow for decentralization but still give people the ability to browse them as one community and if you so happen to be registered on something like lemmy.world, then you cant see the beehaw.org content but can see the rest etc.
https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2023/join-the-fediverse/
Not sure if it helps or not, but, I made that post earlier to assist onboarding a bit.
Nice. Thanks. I spent a good amount of time on a few links jsut mass adding communities of interest. Will just remove ones that don’t work out. No way to really organize or group them by topic though.
There is a github issue to allow communities to be federated-
Ie, this community can be hosted on multiple instances, for example.
That would help some too.
On a side note. Do you mind if i post your blog post in the sidebar on my instance.
Right now my instance isnt open. But given a possible surge coming on 7/1 I am chewing on opening it up to be a "user-only" federated instance. As in, no real communities, just a speed instance to setup an account and join other communities.
Not sure if im going to even do it, just thinking about it right now.
Feel free- Just do me a favor, if you come across some useful information we can share to others, please let me know and I will update it.
After reading some of the concerns from other various communities today, I ended up locking down my registrations to requiring both approval, and a valid email. I don't expect to get a ton of users, but, I wanted to reduce the chance of "Troll users" joining, and then giving my instance a bad name.... Or users posting content, which is not appropriate/illegal.
That is essentially what my instance is. The small handful of communities here, are either for my instance itself for me to share news, OR, communities related to some of my public projects.
Absolutely will. And thanks a bunch.
I'm having the same thoughts on registration. Require email at least to just...reduce throwaways and trolls. Mines application only because "closing" it is confusing as it just spins. And I may leave it to application only.
Same with NSFW content. I don't know of a good way to defederate some of those instances and track that. So i unchecked the box and tossed a disclaimer in. I really just don't want drama from my hosting provider. Just want a place people can login and go to some of the other instances that are more focused on curating content and communities. I just dont have time for that myself.
That is an easy fix! Just host behind cloudflare. Your ISP/Datacenter/etc can't see anything as the data is encrypted between lemmy <---> cloudflare.
I don't care if anyone posts NSFW content, AS LONG AS... its in a NSFW community and/or tagged NSFW. (AND, obviously not questionable/illegal)
Yeah. Strongly considering cloudflare for sure.
Absolutely. Multiple ways to address some of these issues. Hopeful for the future.
Would different parts of the community be hosted on different instances, thereby spreading out the burden? Or would the entire community be mirrored to each of the hosting instances, thereby providing backup security?
I've actually been wondering about that. For example, what if an instance with a popular community went down or defederated from everyone? Would all the content of that community be lost to everyone else? I'm guessing that under those circumstances one or more new communities would be started to replace the "lost" community, although things could get complicated if there were more than one trying to replace the original - or if the original community refederated after the replacement communities developed.
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.
I think anyways the registration process should be dumbed down. Simple version:
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/
I actually like that idea. It's simple, and effective.
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.
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.
A few points about #1 I did not see talked about. First global ID is of a lot less value on Forums then on things like Mastodon. At least the way I use forums I have no interest in building a persona. Frankly would prefer totally different IDs on different servers and frankly I think we should encourage people to be subject focused not persona focused on Lemmy anyway. There's to much of this ego stuff that goes on on other platforms.
The second thing is logging into multiple systems is a solved problem. If you do not have a password manager get one. Bitwarden or one of the LastPass versions depending on your platform for example. Another better way is SQRL or U2F. There is also a more recent thing, maybe PassKeys (?), cannot remember. In particular central authentication servers are nuts. Not even LastPass that specializes in them could do it correctly. Just NO. More then that let us not rebuild Reddit. We do not want central infrastructure.
I understand that you don't. But some of us do not mind these things and/or want them. Perhaps there is a compromise (e.g. an optional global ID if you opt in to the system)
I feel the same way - totally understand why some people wouldn't, but I definitely would appreciate the utility. Looking at the way someone interacts with others is often a consideration when I'm deciding whether to engage with them myself.
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.
How do decentralized identities interact with unique usernames? By Zooko's triangle, if identities are distributed and secure (implied by unique), the names are not human-meaningful. So we would be identified by public keys rather than usernames, like Tor onion addresses. Am I understanding this right?
@DaughterOfMars That’s why you do your research and create an account on a successful instance so you don’t have that problem. I have a lemmy account and mastodon. I have lemmy because of the blackout but didn’t know what I was doing. I note know how to use lemmy and mastodon from the user side of things. Lemmy for my subs and general looking at the sub home page and communities. Mastodon to chitchat and everything else
You're pointing out the exact problem that I am describing: Users will naturally flock to the largest, most stable instances, thus centralizing lemmy and removing the benefit of federation.
@DaughterOfMars True that. I did my own research and now know what the fediverse is about and wish I didn’t jus blindly follow people. I could have joined an instance of what I liked. Oh well lesson learned. There needs to be a faq about the fediverse before people just come.
you can still join an or any instance you like. it is not that big of a hurdle.
There was a lot of chaos around the migration, no surprises there. We can't change the past, but we can set goals to make the future better.
@DaughterOfMars Yep. :P
Except not when Instances pop up for very specific niche categories. The owners can decide how to run them. Since they will likely be impassioned subject matter experts. That will spread the load of moderation away from general instances. Then if their owners get shady or whatever, someone else can create their own and they can post on the big general instances about their new hockey ballet Fortnite instance and the old instance owner can't stop them.
Looking at the top instances right now there's quite some non-generic instances close to the top and lemmy.ml is actively telling people to look elsewhere on its signup page.
Mastodon/lemmy interaction needs to get better, yes, being generally text-based I think they should pretty much merge, protocol-wise. I also want to be able to subscribe to peertube channels though wouldn't even begin to expect my instance to suddenly provide video hosting.
The idea of federating communities does sound like a good idea. Now that I think of it I'm surprised that isn't already a thing.
There needs a new governing body similar to bitcoins, where decisions are made by admins on a democratic basis. Half yearly meetings etc.
I think decentralised IDs is a good idea, wouldn’t be too difficult to achieve, the donations should go into a larger pot and then split based on user size of instances to maintain them properly
Well, #1 is kind of impossible now. Different people can have the same ID on different instances.
#2, unless they really want to just be their own separate community completely, like an entirely different website, then yeah of course. That's the point. Regarding the current major defederation, my understanding is that this not meant to be permanent and is a different situation. It's a workaround basically.
Using DIDs would involve a completely different system. Everyone would have to create a new identity anyway.
Friendica, I believe, federates their groups. You can see them from mastodon as a user. I guess in AP vocabulary they are an actor. You can post to the group from mastodon too.
However let me just bring into mind that we recently defederated from some Lemmy instances and for which reasons we did that (as beehaw I mean).
Lateposting, but DIDs would also solve a problem I have on kbin. I have an account on a certain kbin server because I wanted to pick a smallish server. A server small enough that it isn’t a big hub and thus helps out with federation, but big enough that it’s probably not just one person’s personal server that will only ever run during the 10 minute windows where they personally want to check kbin, which probably won’t overlap with my own.
Sometimes that server goes down. So I also have an account on the biggest kbin server of them all, kbin.social, so I can still use the site and interact with it when my home server is down.
Posting this on Beehaw because I didn’t subscribe to Technology until after this post was made, and I currently have no way to force this post to show up for me on kbin.