151–160 of 201 posts
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In principle this probably happens but the alternative is having no large vibrant communities.
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…
> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice. Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes…
If you're thinking of federation in terms of "apps" yes it's doomed. Like with email, you have to think about it in terms of "service". The "gravitate to one provider" problem is there (as with gmail), but those who care can still have their own email services or use reasonable third parties. The tragedy of course is that very few people care.
I have had a number of actually average users asking me about the Reddit blackouts recently. Most of them don't know of Reddit beyond the first party app. 3 or 4 didn't even know Reddit had a website. None of them could even comprehend how you could use a third party app to access Reddit and their minds were blown when I told them that Reddit didn't have an app at all originally and the Reddit app today was originally Alien Blue.
For most people, the word "service" doesn't even enter into their minds. It's an app. It either does what they want or it doesn't. The inability for many in our group, including myself, to comprehend and understand this is why the fediverse, Linux, crypto for non-investment/gambling purposes, etc. continue to fail to gain much popularity. For most people, they don't care how it works... they only care that "it just works".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Check out https://lemmyverse.net/communities
It just needs to be posted as a main aggregator at https://join-lemmy.org, or even better, on the right hand side panel on every Lemmy instance.
I know this would be a centralized database of communities (which is probably frowned upon in the fediverse) but I don't think there's a sensible way around it.
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Imagine being unable to email someone because he holds an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago, and think again.
This is the point of federation though. It allows for different standards of moderation to actually exist. If you don't like the way a server moderates, then don't join it (or transfer to another server, which you can mostly do with Mastodon). Hell, run your own mastodon server (or use a "mastodon-as-a-service" service) which is pretty trivial for micro instances. The idea that there is one globally correct way to mo…
Having to choose between politically charged "you can't read that" gatekeepers is a dystopian nightmare. Yes you can make your own, but next thing you know is "block this list of servers or we block you".
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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.
Honestly these all seem like solvable albeit hard problems. Learning curve is a ux problem. Yes federated is a bit harder, but i think this is more the general problem that open source is terrible at ux, especially when it doesn't have sonething to copy, not a fundamental federated issue. (Cross-instance) Authentication - definitely hard, but seems solvable as well. Whether with fancy crypto or maybe some federated o…
Given that I, and probably half of hacker news, preface most of my searches with "site:reddit.com", I'd say Yes. Definitely Yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.