Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Federated App Problem

plug-world.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 201 posts

Re: The Federated App Problem

#121

Post by WJW »

vGPU wrote: post #75
croutonwagon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd

Which is exactly what worries me. I don’t want other people deciding who I can read and who I can’t. I don’t want other people deciding what voices should be heard. This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.

Well, turn the automagic updating of the banlists off then. It's configurable, but it's not the default because most people are not interested in seeing the posts of (as an example) people who upload kiddie porn, nor do they want that on their hard drive in the off chance the FBI comes by with questions.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#122

Post by erlend_sh »

armchairhacker wrote: post #39

A big problem is that you don't actually see content on other instances. Also, you can't link accounts between instances (EDIT: you can post and subscribe to communities on other instances, but it's not obvious. You can't link 2 accounts on separate instances though) There are several rust instances: https://lemmy.ml/c/rust , https://programming.dev/c/rust , https://lemmyrs.org/ , and probably more. Why aren't they l…

There’s an ongoing discussion about how to better facilitate this here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

Re: The Federated App Problem

#123

Post by davidpaulyoung »

Glyptodon wrote: post #89
sxg wrote: post #4

I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…

I think if the intent and structure of federation curves towards every household having its own server or something analogous the federated universe seems more sensible. But that does seem like a difficult curve until we have a universe where there's something like app-store level ease around self hosting your household services on something equivalent to a fancy home router is the norm. And that universe seems far o…

We're offering this at Federated Computer: https://federated.computer. Nextcloud, Jitsi, Matrix/Element, all domain level services, all private.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#124

Post by nologic01 »

ranguna wrote: post #90
nologic01 wrote: post #88

This discussion could be a movie scene: Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free. Prisoners step out in the sun and get confused by their freedom to move in all directions. They gloomily walk back to their well understood confines. The door locks again, this time for good. Ok, fair enough, we don't want them prisoners to go back to the "comfort" of their cell. What is needed? Not much. A few damn signposts wo…

Funny analogy, here's another one: Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free. Prisoners step out in the sun to find themselves confused in a never ending maze full of branches in all directions. They have difficulties finding shelter and food. They walk back to their well understood confines, in relief. The door doesn't lock, but they choose to stay either way.

> The door doesn't lock

Assuming you are not a prison operator this smacks of complacency.

In the digital age where rules are there to be broken fast, any and all complacency will be used against you (us).

The era of web 2.0 social media, damaging as it was, is drawing towards a close.

The next phase will be an ever tighter "embrace", with airtight control of digital identity, access to financial transactions and unprecedented AI manipulation. Of-course the inmates will enjoy Cloud Atlas type amenities.

Freedom was never easy and is not an exportable good either. It is either in your real constitution or not. I just hope that there is a critical mass of countries that actually mean it.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#125

Post by jojobas »

burnished wrote: post #112
jojobas wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only caveat is that what's well moderated and what's not depends on who you ask.

That isnt a caveat so much as a fearure

Imagine being unable to email someone because he holds an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago, and think again.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#126

Post by vaylian »

> Here’s the biggest kicker for me. Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS.

That's a rather odd argument as "the biggest kicker". I'm fairly sure the teams at Google and other search providers are very aware of the fediverse and its rising relevance. It might be hard to find something today, but eventually the search engines will be improved so that they understand federated content.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#127

Post by badtension »

stereolambda wrote: post #107

If the goal is to talk about your interests with strangers (and not pull in your whole family and political and journalistic class), some minimal federation friction could be beneficial actually, as a soft filter. Maybe it's worth it to have some common pre-Eternal September spaces on the Internet, even it means not building unicorn empires. The latter seems to be a mindset people aren't able to shake off for some re…

The problem is discoverability. You don't know where to look for stuff or people. I wanted to check out this whole Lemmy thing and found almost completely dead (no comments) communities linked from their project page.

Where do I go? How do I search for something worthwhile? There's no central space to find it, compare communities etc. I was curious but now I am kind of put off.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#128

Post by danijelb »

sxg wrote: post #4

I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…

Current federation looks like that, a bunch of small independent communities focused on a single topic like tech or photography or whatever, but it doesn't have to be like that. If federation catches on then the most likely the pick will be between 5-10 huge general instances run by corporations.

In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors.

The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#129

Post by badtension »

ranguna wrote: post #92
Animats wrote: post #86

Yes. The usual problems. Discovery, identity, storage. Identity is the hardest problem. Yes, there's stuff like OpenID. But few non-programmers use it. We badly need some kind of ID system that doesn't depend on a vendor that's in the advertising business. Discovery is a problem mostly because Google has a monopoly in search. The problem with federated storage is that storage is currently organized by "where", not by…

Re:discoverability And because the option to not index posts is enabled by default and a good chunk of the fediverse is opposed to indexing due to their irrational fear of bots: https://fedsearch.io/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937 https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s ...

> https://fedsearch.io/

> Due to extreme backlash from the Mastodon community we decided to end the project, it is obviously not wanted by server admins.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#130

Post by David_SQOX »

mariusor wrote: post #79
bluedemon wrote: post #76

Here's a rant by a person that is annoyed that redditors are not understanding the fediverse: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-th... And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???" They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are act…

> They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them. In all fairness those were the exact same comments when people moved away from Digg to reddit, only in the opposite direction. History is just repeating itself.

I remember vividly when the digg exodus happened, I don't ever remember a single person complaining that reddit, nor digg, were too technical/difficult to understand/use.

Both sites you simply clicked the register link, input your username/pass/email then done. The fediverse does not have a clean onboarding that lends itself to comprehension by a regular non-technical person. It seems way over the head of your average user. I've tried to get friends to check out Lemmy and it's a solid no-go.

If you need an entire matrix of understanding of a concept before feeling comfortable to use it then it is simply too much cognitive friction.

Post reply on HN