this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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What is the thing that has surprised you the most about the Fediverse? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by croobat@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

To me, it was the astounding amount of interactivity between the community.

At first I thought this was temporarily caused by the whole migration from the R site. But, just out of curiosity, I signed up to Mastodon and have enjoyed myself just as much as here.

Most of the Lemmy post's / Mastodon toots have almost as much or more comments / boosts than upvotes or favorites. It feels so organic and makes me realize how much these huge companies employ technics to pretty much force to interact the way they see fit.

It reminds me of that good old saying "you are not immune to propaganda", well I guess neither I nor anyone is immune to psychological tricks either.

P.S. I also love the fact that since there isn't pretty much any money involved, most opinions and interactions are genuine. Like, who is gonna pay this dude to advertise a book through BookWyrm? That increases immensely the odds that said person is being honest with their opinion of that book. It's amazing.

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[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The two biggest surprises I've had so far:

  1. Lack of federated login / single sign on. It seems bizarre in a land of federated instances to not have the identity provider decoupled (or even truly decentralized). Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. "Backed up" your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn't exist today. And even if it were added, how do you validate?

I hate to even suggest it just because of how much of a buzzword it has become. But blockchain feels like a possible answer to the identity problem. It would couple one's identity to the network as opposed to the instance.

That's not to say that instance-level identities shouldn't be allowed as well; but it would be nice to have the option. Right now one basically needs to sign up for separate accounts on as many instances as possible to prevent bad actors from posing as them. A universal ID would solve that.

  1. Lack of historical data. Are you the first subscriber to !bobswidgets@feder.icio.us through lemmy.world? Doesn't matter if the original community had fiftyleven posts. You only get to see any created after you subscribe?
[–] jrubal1462@vlemmy.net 5 points 1 year ago

I think you're justified to be wary of the buzzwordiness of Blockchain though. For the 2 days I spent learning about what all this is before I signed up, every time I heard "de-centralized" I kept asking myself, "How sure am I that this isn't some weirdly elaborate crypto scam?"

Bonus fear: I was also concerned for a while that this was just going to be a refuge for hate groups who have been kicked off of major platforms. I've been pleasantly surprised so far.

[–] Deref@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Bluesky is working on persistent identity with a DNS based scheme. You still have instance accounts but they're optional and posts reference DIDs so getting kicked out won't break mentions.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

These are both definitely pain points. The good news is that the second issue can be dealt with manually, even though it's annoying: you can copy and paste post links from the community on the server you're browsing, throw it into the search form, and the remote post will get pulled in. This is a common convention in almost all fediverse platforms.

[–] tal@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. "Backed up" your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn't exist today. And even if it were added, how do you validate?

Normally, you deal with something like wanting to authenticate to many different entities via use of a public key. I suppose one could hypothetically have a mechanism to register a PGP or SSH pubkey with the network.

But I don't know how easy it would be for most users to handle the key management.

[–] tc@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Regarding the first issue, you could check out https://hubzilla.org which has NomadicIdentity, but it still doesn't solve it for ActivityPub. Maybe later.

[–] bbtai@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Lack of historical data. Are you the first subscriber to !bobswidgets@feder.icio.us through lemmy.world? Doesn't matter if the original community had fiftyleven posts. You only get to see any created after you subscribe?

This was suuuch a mystery for me as a noob, I didn't know what was happening!

[–] Decide@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've been thinking about this for the last couple days, and I agree. There's even the problem of duplicate "subs* popping up on other instances. Federation as it currently is seems to be something that works a lot better with a Twitter alternative than a Reddit one. There's probably some tweaks that can be done to make it a more unified experience. I have some ideas, but I don't think they'd work.

These are my suggestions, and I'm sure there's a reason why they haven't been done.

  • Break down the Lemmy/Kbin Federation further. Each sub is it's own instance, this makes it cheaper for people to run their own instances, instead of running a full blown site with several subs. This will also allow for replacements for subs to be created easily, and removes the chance for another Spez to show up.
  • Make the user account an instance. Each individual post or comment is made to the user profile/instance, but is copied or reflected to the sub it is posted to. If the user account is deleted, a signal is sent to each server that the user has deleted their profile, and to remove each comment/post with the users unique ID.
  • Make each sub lowercase and remove all white space, so that individual "comic" instances, or "funny" instances appear together by default.
[–] tinwhiskers@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

But you can also have multiple subs on reddit for the same topic. e.g. AI and ArtificialIntelligence. People choose the best one and they either stand or fall based on merit. Things will settle down.

[–] kresten@feddit.dk 2 points 1 year ago

I completely disagree with that it works better for mastodon than lemmy. I think it was confusing as hell on mastodon, but makes perfectly good sense on lemmy.

Communities are a major advantage, because they allow people without technical knowhow and capital, to create and moderate places of common discussion. This was an issue with mastodon because instances was the only way to divide users into topics, which prevented non tech savvy people from making these categories. Having communities, separates the concern of hosting from the concern of moderating.

Furthermore, I don't understand the problem people have with "duplicate" instances. What is the issue with subscribing to more than one? It's not like you have a limited number of subscriptions. There are already a couple threads on the issue tracker on GitHub, about implementing "multi communities" and so on, it has too many downfalls in my opinion.

[–] mfz@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately since the Reddit migration started. I believe it could be solved at the client level at least. Unifying magazines over instances and behind the scenes pull in and follows twin magazines at other instances and presents them in a single abstract magazine.

There are probably reasons why you at the server level or user level want the low level community access and behavior we have today but judging of all comments and how we typically behave as humans I would say that is rather the unusual case not the mainstream.

Such users could easily then opt in at the instance level and everyone else looking for a more β€œcentralized” experience can still have that through the client app.

No doubt it would take some work but I believe it is very doable given my understanding of the Activity Pub protocol and how it works today.

[–] minnieo@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

to me, it was surprising just how easy the fediverse was to understand if i stopped trying to think about it how i was taught to think by centralized platforms.

at first, i was really hesitant to migrate. i was confused by kbin, lemmy, mastodon, and especially the fediverse. i didn't think i could ever understand it. i wasn't confident in it. but, after a few hours of exploring, interacting, watching people talk about it and reading explanations, it clicked into place and suddenly made sense, a whole lotta sense. now, i am actually teaching others about what the fediverse is with little to no trouble and helping them migrate to kbin from reddit, and thats amazing. having tons of fun here! πŸ‘

[–] baascus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

We need polished mobile apps to really push the fediverse to the masses. It has been a great experience so far though and I think I'll stay a while.

[–] gamermanh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Jerboa works for me, at least, better than the reddit official one ever did...

[–] CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi 2 points 1 year ago

Same here. Although I have to admit it's not ready for the mainstream. I can imagine people struggling, for example, about what instance to input if they just charged in without taking note of the specific instance they joined.

I mean, for us it's simple. For others, maybe not.

[–] kratoz29@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

It needs their tweaks though, adding new communities from other instances is impossible, or at least that's what it seems.

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I've got a handful of friends where our only group chain is through a Matrix-Synapse server I have running in my closet. Everyone installed Element, and it works exactly like any other messaging program.

The only downside is that at the moment, it routinely and randomly struggles to decrypt certain messages.

[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 1 points 1 year ago

What we need are more backend and full stack developers to shore up the core functionality. A polished mobile app is not going to cancel out the other shortcomings.

There are critical bugs and missing functions/features that need to be addressed first. Otherwise the masses are going to take one look and never return.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

The apps situation has gotten a lot better over the years, but I can't understate how big of a sea change it was when Mastodon first came along. Prior to them, most fediverse apps were terrible. The influx of clients that came out of that community changed the network in so many ways.

[–] WreckingBANG@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I think the concept of the Fediverse working that well is still sureal. It is so fascinating how a entirely community driven project works better then what some comapanys do. This is what Social Media should be. A place by Humans for Humans owned by everyone. Not some Company that just wants to make money.

[–] VulcanSphere@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fediverse has taught me that social media can be decentralised.

Instead of stuck in a platform, Vulcan can read, write, and react to something posted in another instance (for example, from kbin to Lemmy).

[–] dill@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I absolutely LOVE the open source/federated aspects of things! I think it's just so cool and interesting to me how it all works! :)

[–] Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It took me a while to wrap my head around, but once I got it I'm loving it! Especially now the issues with the massive influx are starting to go away. We're on lemmy right now, right? But you and I are both posting from kbin, and you posted 3 minutes ago, and I can see it, and my reply is getting through. This was NOT possible yesterday.

[–] dill@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's amazing to me how fast its all progressing! I really love this stuff and am so glad to see it taking off as fast as it is!

[–] iByteABit@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

It gives me hope for the future of the internet, even if the average layman never learns or cares about it all. It's interesting to think that the Internet started this way as well, it was a complete nerd thing at first and nothing like we know it today.

I hope I can contribute to either kbin or lemmy once I find some time, probably Lemmy since I know Rust and nothing of PHP. Perhaps it can be a fun way to learn PHP as well though

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Seeing the same sorts of growing pains that other important Internet services have gone through. Yes, there's friction. It turns out, that's normal. It's probably going to keep happening. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

[–] Dresta@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven't found the porn I like yet

[–] minnieo@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

be the change you wanna see in the world

[–] nafri@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

just don't forget to fill in the alt text on the picture