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The Federated App Problem

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Re: The Federated App Problem

#131

Post by JCharante »

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…

Why should 1 person or instance own rust? Why should they be linked. They aren’t the same thing. The namespaces are rust@programming.dev and rust@lemmy.ml so on obviously they aren’t the same thing.

You’re confusing instances with communities. Instances are servers. People create and mod communities. They shouldn’t be linked because they have different mods and rules.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#132

Post by sxg »

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.

During the Digg migration, the main criticism I remember is that Reddit was ugly but still usable. For casual users of the fediverse, I think the criticism is that kbin, Lemmy, and Mastodon are actually too confusing to understand and therefore unusable, which is a key distinction.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#133

Post by kossTKR »

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…

Yeah, tried the same with Lemmy. A list of half done of dead communities, all of them with zero explanation of why and how.

Then i read about the codebase and people were struggling with SQL so performance is bad - i mean what? is that really the state things, where's the talent working on this?

I'm honestly surprised that both the design, performance and docs of these alternatives are this bad in 2023.

If this has to work you need an extremely simple and well designed landing page with a super simple explanation of how this works, the creation of a user should work on more or less all instances, and you should be able to easily meta search for the communities you want and get an easy overview quickly.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#134

Post by nisegami »

Pathogen-David wrote: post #101
copperx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com. What people? Are they in the room with us right now? Anyone that works at a small/medium/large company has an email address @company.com

Except most normal people don't use their corporate email address for personal stuff. I've always used a custom domain for my main email addresses and whenever I've had to give it to someone else verbally it inevitably leads to some amount of confusion. At the very least they get thrown off by the fact that I didn't say gmail/outlook/yahoo after the @ and I have to repeat the domain name.

>Except most normal people don't use their corporate email address for personal stuff.

This does not line up with what I've seen in the world.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#136

Post by pixl97 »

badtension wrote: post #127
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.

Discoverability is a double edged sword. You'll find it, but so will every bot and scammer on the planet too. Then moderation will get ever stricter to get rid of the abusers and eventually the place becomes a mess for one reason or another.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#137

Post by pixl97 »

jojobas wrote: post #125
burnished wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean if that opinion was they can send commercial messages to unsolicited users I don't have to imagine at all. I've been on the internet long enough to remember the days before spam filters.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#138

Post by HWR_14 »

jojobas wrote: post #125
burnished wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For pretty much any value of "an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago", you are wrong. Other ideas were around at the time.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#139

Post by madeofpalk »

> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right?? To distribute the server load

This is the first I've ever heard of "server load" as being any factor of federation, let alone the primary point.

Re: The Federated App Problem

#140

Post by seanclayton »

David_SQOX wrote: post #130
mariusor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 averag…

> Both sites you simply clicked the register link, input your username/pass/email then done.

Which lemmy site have you used that was any more difficult than that? Click sign up, enter a username and password, and then you're done.

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