Could federation be a turn-off for more 'mainstream' users?

Hey everyone, I'm honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that's because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it's safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I'd been a Reddit user since 2010 so I've witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel--less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.

That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There's other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a 'chatroom' versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, 'visit site--post to site--view content on site'.

Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far--hope to see it grow!

FrostyPolicy,
@FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi avatar

For the not so technically inclined the most confusing part of any fediverse service probably is the idea of "signup in some instance" and then you can interact with peope/posts in other intances too. The lazy mainstream people want a single place to signup and stay like reddit, facebook, twitter etc.

nieceandtows,

IMO, everybody tries to explain what fediverse is, instances are, how they work, so on, and so forth. That's what is pushing people away. Just point them to one place. Lemmy.world seems to have the least friction to signup (no approval, only email confirmation), while also hosting a lot of communities. Just tell people to signup on lemmy.world, and search for whatever communities they want to join, and subscribe to the one with most subscribers. That should be enough. No need to 'educate' them on how fediverse works.

megrania,

I think it will ... if I look at my own use-cases for sites like this, it's connecting with people over shared interests (rather than instances) or scrolling memes. I don't see how any of these use cases benefit from federation (from the user perspective). The looming threat of information disappearing due to defederation, the confusion about instances, etc ... that's off-putting even to tech-savvy users.

Also ultimately I find it questionable from a philosophical perspective. Why should it matter which instance is your "home" instance, unless that's specifically the way of interaction you're looking for?

Again, for me it's interests over instances, and I think the federation aspect is just an additional layer that doesn't add any value.

veloxy,

It shouldn't be a turn off, but it absolutely is right now. Why does federation have to be so visible to the end user? I really don't get it, things could just be federated mostly behind the scenes. It already goes wrong on the homepage where users are faced with "joining a server" and they get overwhelmed by technical terms like "instances" "fediverse" "lemmyverse". Then you have to pick a server and one of the first things you potentially see is complicated url's no one can ever remember and descriptions containing keywords like "piracy", "NSFW", "furry" and lots of other stuff most people aren't interested in. But this already sets the tone of what content there is, which could be good but could also just scary people away pretty quickly.

Then even if a user does decide to go through and pick a server, they need to remember the URL of it. Lots of people still just go to google and type "lemmy", land on the homepage and see no login button and get completely lost.

And that's just signing up.

There needs to be a focus on UX, more specifically in getting rid of all that technical jazz for non technical users and in guiding users toward the content they want to see. People aren't finding the content or are just stuck on a page that doesn't update for days. All the different server related stuff should be invisible unless you want to see it.

There's just way too much focus on "federation" that few people actually care about. If you want people of all ages and interests, it'll have to become a lot simpler.

Faresh,

I mean, all this applies to email, an yet people still use it. And email doesn't even have an join-email.com that guides users, so I guess lemmy already has a better experience.

timeforanap,

I've only just joined and that's because the past few times when I went to join I was confused about joining a certain server. I figured I'd have to investigate which server is best before I joined one and found it was the wrong one.

Now I'm realising it doesn't matter too much. However the toggle at the top of the main page between 'subscribed', 'local' and 'all' took me some time to realise. That was only when I'd subscribed to groups and they weren't appearing on the main page. So wondering how I get to see them was already a point of annoyance.

Having that automatically toggle to 'subscribed' once you've started down that path would have helped.

Anyway, Once you're past choosing a server it all feels strangely familiar and I'm liking it a lot.

linearchaos,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I wish we could just stop making a big deal out of the federation, other than choosing an initial home and having perceived duplicate groups it has more or less no impact to the front end users.

It's a backend thing and we need to bury it more in the UI so people don't feel it.

nickajeglin,

Exactly. Make it infrastructure that's hidden away from the front end. Find some way to wrap up duplicate groups into larger categories or something, and figure out a way to migrate accounts if your home instance tanks. That would cover all my concerns.

leem,

I think there's a lot of potential for grouping up and displaying posts in different ways.

Xer0,

Each community on each instance should have at least one required tag when created. There should be a list of tags available. If you make a meme community, you use the meme tag, and it lumps your community in with every other one that has the meme tag, then you can subscribe to a tag and it shows you all posts from all communities in that tag. There should then be a way to hide posts from certain communities within that tag if they start getting stupid. Not sure how viable this is though.

linearchaos,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

There's a huge stigma around it. A lot of friction with mastodon. I think they're working toward meta-communities.

I do have worries about people signing up to smaller nodes and losing all their posts/subs/data when a node shuts down. It would be kinda cool if we had the ability to merge nodes or have a true decentralized login.

Xer0,

One login for the entire fediverse would make sense.

linearchaos,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

kinddda. you'd still need to do something smart because it needs to be decentralized. IRC handled it with registered nicknames, i'd think we could field something with some form of federated authentication provider, split the data between a few nodes.

falconfetus8,

Agreed! Then it could be really like email! You create an account on an "account server", we'll call it, and then you can use that account to log into "community servers". Instances wouldn't need to federate content with each other, since users could just go to other instances with their account.

linearchaos,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

If you didn't federate the account servers, noone would want to step and and pay for the service for everyone. The accounts need to be spread as much as the data to protect them, but they need to be redundant as well

falconfetus8,

Of course, the account servers should be federated, but the content servers don't need to be.

nickajeglin,

I'm not really up on the intricacies of the federation philosophy, but why isn't it just distributed p2p style?

So there would be 1 forward facing thing that you interact with, but all of the backend functions would be spread across all the volunteer servers/instances. Like torrent seeding.

Maybe that's not even feasible, but I've been wondering since I joined.

linearchaos,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I read this message this morning, and pondered this for quite some time. It's definitely not impossible, but there's a college thesis worth of conidiations and difficult problems to address. There's probably already a number of products that would be a better fit than federation.

The torrent system as it is, is ill fit, it's got the distribute things and protect them with hashes in spades, but unlike forums it doesn't need to deliver you data in a timely fashion. If that copy of Scooby Do and the Reluctant Werewolf takes a couple of days for someone to come online and have you a few k of content, it's no big deal. That said, it IS possible to watch really popular videos over BT.

I think the deepest problem is trying to keep the data online. You obvious can't have a multi-terabyte copy of forums on everyone's box, people are going to need to split and choose who gets what but they you have to figure out a way to keep everything everywhere online. You can't just force people to host everything or you'll end up with unexpected jailbait hosting.

You'd have to sit down for a long time and draw up a spec to even define what your problems are, you'd have to figure out things like, how much of the data do you expect to be available all the time, how many copies do you seed around, how you'd manage to keep people seeding it.

Policing and moderation also becomes a sore subject. Most of the P2P stuff is resilient against removing items by deisgn, it's immutable once launched. For things like edits, you could do versioning systems, but like if someone was doxxed or someone posted nudes of their ex, there's no way to remove the old versions.

Authentication and identification would be a nightmare. you'd probably need to digitally sign everything and keep your keys in a chain of custody, signing each new key with the old one.

it's an awesome thought exercise though.

nickajeglin,

Wow, thanks for such a detailed reply. I was sitting here thinking something like "just take what the server does and uh... distribute it", but it's clearly not trivial.

Animortis,

I mean, it sounds confusing, but it's also why all this works... So I mean, who cares? Baby meet bathwater, etc.

damipereira,

If lemmy every becomes mainstream the implementation details will be completely lost to people, and that's ok. You can try explaining someone what a web browser is, but people will still say "I opened google" or even "I opened internet" instead of "I opened chrome". With lemmy there will probably be a few huge instances that people just gravitate to, and if/when something goes wrong, communities will have to migrate, and users will have to try to get into a new instance.

Hedup,

I already can imagine some people talking to their tech savy friend and telling them

fediwhat? I don't want any of that. I will stay and use lemmy.world

damipereira,

It's like old bar names from when people did not know how to read, I don't know what that fediverse and lemmy stuff is, I just go to the white monkey.

RBWells,

What this reminds me of (and yes, showing my age here) is the text based Usenet groups of old. It's kind of clunky but feels real the same way.

birdmancaw,

I only joined yesterday or the day before but I have to admit, I'm not loving this place so far. Adding communities that are not part of this instance is a giant PITA. The whole instance getting federated or defederated seemingly at the whim of the instance host is a bit sus to me too. Also, for some reason when I'm typing it just keeps having a popup saying "report created" in the bottom left. This place also is just as much of an echo chamber as Reddit from what I have seen, which is by far my biggest gripe with Reddit.

Hedup,

It actually sounds like you would've been way more satisfied if you joined some instance like beehaw.org that have a more sanitized approach to all this. But then again you said you don't want defederation. Seems like you want to eat the cake, but also have it.

birdmancaw,

Is Beehaw less of an echo chamber? Reading their sidebar it seems like it would be even more of one. I'm curious as to why you think I might be happier there. Is it easier to navigate somehow?

Hedup,

I just imagined that because they are vetting you when you register. But surely you can just join any other small instance and customize your feed. You can even stay in lemmy.world instance and unsubscribe from /c/lemmy.world and other lemmy world communities to spare yourself those echoes.

birdmancaw,

I only joined yesterday or the day before but I have to admit, I'm not loving this place so far. Adding communities that are not part of this instance is a giant PITA. The whole instance getting federated or defederated seemingly at the whim of the instance host is a bit sus to me too. Also, for some reason when I'm typing it just keeps having a popup saying "report created" in the bottom left. This place also is just as much of an echo chamber as Reddit from what I have seen, which is by far my biggest gripe with Reddit.

thesanewriter,

From what I can tell, all of humanity is an echo chamber. In every single space we build, every relationship we form, and every conversation ever had, people will try to team up with people that agree with them and stand against people that disagree with them. Lemmy has ended up doing that because all space built by humans will end up doing that, it is inevitable to a large extent.

Gradually_Adjusting,
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world avatar

I'm going to take a risky stance and say getting onboard isn't actually hard. I didn't learn anything or read anything to get in, I just kind of poked a few buttons and wrote two sentences about why I'm joining.

That said, the gumption to A) try anything new and B) write two cogent sentences might just be enough to deter a few people, and that's no bad thing. The site(s) don't need to become profitable, so it's kind of a non-issue who joins or not.

Gradually_Adjusting,
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world avatar

I'm going to take a risky stance and say getting onboard isn't actually hard. I didn't learn anything or read anything to get in, I just kind of poked a few buttons and wrote two sentences about why I'm joining.

That said, the gumption to A) try anything new and B) write two cogent sentences might just be enough to deter a few people, and that's no bad thing. The site(s) don't need to become profitable, so it's kind of a non-issue who joins or not.

eating3645,

In my opinion, the fact that you feel it's a question worth asking is an answer in itself - absolutely it is.

AbsurdityAccelerator,

Yes, it will absolutely be a barrier to entry to many. Especially people who never used discussion boards. Before reddit, I was an active member on a dozen or so boards, and always wished there was a simpler way for them to interact. So, Lemmy makes sense to me.

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