One Small step, a giant leap for Fediverse but...

Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc.... and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That's soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how "signup anywhere, its the same thing" evolves.

ebike_enjoyer,

I’ve been on mastodon for a couple of years, here’s how I handled instance fomo there. I made an account on a few different instances that I liked, got a feel for each instance’s rules, what was allowed, what wasn’t. Over time, I started to realize what kind of mod styles I liked, whether I cared much about the local timeline vs my subscribed timeline (I didn’t care as much about this on masto, but here, I’m much more interested in the local timeline, which I’ll get into in a bit.) Eventually, I settled on just one account, but really you never have to if you don’t want to, lots of people have alts, even back on non federated social media.

I’m doing this process again here. I currently have accounts on Beehaw, Kbin.social, and slrpnk.net, where I’m posting from currently. No matter which one, I can follow any community I want from any of these accounts provided they aren’t defederated. But, I also get a unique local timeline view, and a specific culture brought on by mods and users for each. I really think this gives power to smaller, more topic focused instances like slrpnk.net. Specifically, I’ve noticed two things it gives me that Reddit didn’t necessarily have

  1. a quick “show me only posts related to this specific topic I’m interested in” button via the local timeline. (This could technically kind of be built with multireddits, but that wouldn’t quite be the same)
  2. (what I think is even better) show me more general topics, but hosted by people also interested in this one specific root topic (for my instance, the root topic would be solarpunk, but for others, I’ve seen instances dedicated to star trek, cyberpunk, local towns, the list goes on.) This I think has more community building power in an a way that is unique to here and that I’m interested in seeing more of, personally. After all, someone could make a subreddit called, idk, r/startrekurbanism, but I don’t see that taking off on Reddit. It would be weirdly extremely niche, and the chances of it showing up on your TL (which you need to happen to encourage engagement) over more popular posts is minimal. Here though, I bet a community dedicated to discussing city planning and design ran by Star Trek fans could have some engagement just due to the local timeline bringing it to people’s attention. This has potential to allow Lemmy to be weird and unique in a way previous aggregator sites couldn’t pull off.

Tl;dr: local timelines are cool. try a few instances out to get a feel for what you like (and to get over instance fomo), and give fedi time to grow on you. It may not work out for everyone, and that’s okay, but I really have grown to prefer Mastodon to Twitter, and I’m excited to see a federated alternative to Reddit gain traction.

yesTHEalex,

I somewhat went through that. Signed up on one instance cause it seemed a cool science based one to check out but then realized that if I wanted to make a community for anything else, I couldn't do it there

Tragic,

Welcome to the fedoraverse

cheeseOnBread,

I agree it's somewhat complex for the average user, but I 'm questioning whether they really need to understand. I subscribed to kbin, started using it like reddit. Federation is now enabled, too, but if I hadn't seen a post about it, I wouldn't even have noticed. The cool thing is you don't need to care where the content is if you don't want to, you still can enjoy the platform ang get a lot out of it.

Habnab,

Why did you post this to selfhosted? lol

Puzzlehead,
@Puzzlehead@lemmy.world avatar

that i just realized, lol

ondradoksy,
ondradoksy avatar

I'm new here, can someone explain how this whole federating thing works?

minnieo,
minnieo avatar

Someone on my server came up with a mall analogy which I am extending upon, might be helpful:
Sites are like cities (kbin is a city, lemmy is a city, etc)
Instances are like malls (kbin.social is a mall)
Stores inside a mall are like magazines
Cities can have multiple malls, and the malls all talk to each other and give each other information about what's happening in their mall in relation to their stores, which is why we can see posts from other instances of the same site.
And what's more, malls (instances) in different cities (sites) can also talk to malls in another city and pass information about their malls to the other cities' malls. Cities talk to other cities. Translation: The sites share content with each other.

another analogy: Federation in the fediverse is like a group of islands with bridges connecting them. Each island represents a different platform, and the bridges allow people to travel and interact between the islands. Even though each island has its own unique features and rules, the bridges enable communication and sharing of ideas across the entire network of islands.

I hope this didn't further confuse you lol. my protest server has extensive explanations and one on one help with this if you'd like.

Thekingoflorda,

You know how discord has multiple servers?
Now imagine if those servers where actually owned by a person (self-hosted), and each server could connect with the other servers, so you can see content on whatever server you are.

bevan,

best explanation I've seen for the fediverse

1019throw,

For reddit folks - imagine there are 10 different reddits with all of their own individual subreddits. You have the ability to only view and comment on yours, but also can look and comments on all of those others ones if you want to.

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

on kbin there was a long period of no federation and so I think we kinda ended up with this "kbin is kbin and then there's this other stuff" mindset. I think it helped ease a lot of us into this fediverse stuff lol. the analogy I use is email :) why pick yahoovs gmail vs protonmail? same idea.

VulcanSphere,
VulcanSphere avatar

Now we are federating, properly.

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

naturally, we're posting on selfhosted@lemmy.world right now lol

TheAmorphous,

That analogy doesn't hold when yahoo can block gmail and proton can block all yahoo content, etc.

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

they can do that though. it just doesn't happen with big email providers. but many large email providers auto-block smaller ones.

nii236,

Yep, so now its very difficult to run your own mailserver. Extrapolating this to Lemmy, I guess large instances will start autoblocking small instances by default.

darknavi,

The sign up process is a bit non-standard, but I have mostly browsed via app (Mlem) and it makes the cross-community sub and commenting fairly seamless.

Mountaineer,
@Mountaineer@lemmy.world avatar

I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷‍♂️

I don't want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it's beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

What federation issues were you having with aussie.zone? I used that one for a while before creating my own instance.

Mountaineer,
@Mountaineer@lemmy.world avatar

The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.

By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to !australia AND upvote boobs.

minnieo,
minnieo avatar

about the defederation, this comment about it is great: https://kbin.social/m/main@sh.itjust.works/t/22433/Beehaw-defederated-us#entry-comment-90015

"I think it's easy to take this personally but I think it's more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user's bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.

I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit."

there will be growing pains.

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

you kinda have to pick your poison. some groups will naturally segregate themselves, while others will try to remain open for everything. you have to find an instance that matches the way you engage with stuff. Or you can use multiple instances if need be.

I'm pretty happy here on kbin.social and I doubt I'd leave if some other instance ends up blocking us.

Whooping_Seal,
@Whooping_Seal@sh.itjust.works avatar

It goes both ways though, if beehaw isolates itself enough the rest of the fediverse will make its own communities that effectively replace the ones we lost from them defederating.

As of now they're blocking 387 communities according to this

nii236,

What were the federation issues with aussie.zone?

Mountaineer,
@Mountaineer@lemmy.world avatar

https://lemmy.world/comment/206680

nii236,

That's lame. I just run my own instance. I'm based in Perth and the server itself is in Sydney, so nice and fast.

SaltySalamander,

Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world

Fucking wonderful.

Puzzlehead,
@Puzzlehead@lemmy.world avatar

and if I am not mistaken I can federate from here to mastodon as well. right?

sotolf,
sotolf avatar

Yeah, you can :)

argentcorvid,
@argentcorvid@midwest.social avatar

Following and Commenting/replying works but posting requires a title or subject field that mastodon doesn't support.

argentcorvid,
@argentcorvid@midwest.social avatar

Looks like I might be wrong about posting from mastodon. Seen some posts on on other instances where the mastodon text is just replicated as the title. Could be lemmy version dependant.

Puzzlehead,
@Puzzlehead@lemmy.world avatar

and if i am not mistaken I can't federate with mastodon either. right?

MerylasFalguard,
@MerylasFalguard@lemmy.world avatar

Yea. I feel like Beehaw cutting a lot of the larger general communities out from two of the biggest instances is highlighting early a major hurdle that’s gonna make the whole fediverse thing difficult to get a lot of people on board with. I don’t want to have to keep making new accounts to access stuff, but like… half of the communities I had subscribed to are just gone now because the admins over there decided they don’t want to play with anyone else, I guess.

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

Yea that sucks.

BlackCoffee,
BlackCoffee avatar

Beehaw has a code of conduct that everyone can read.

They already said that it is hard to effectively mod because the tooling isn't there yet.

I really wish people would hamper their expectations a bit. With more people coming, there will be more people willing to contribute for tooling etc. These projects are in it's infancy so growing pains will happen.

Facebook for example pays around 500mil per year for moderating and Reddit has free labor for it. But even then, Reddit is dependent on 3rd party tooling for their moderators to effectively moderate. That is a company that exists for 18 years or so?

At one point I expect there to be tooling available to make it easier to target ban people from an specific instance or even defederate specific accounts from an instance.

But if you are a mod team of 4 people without effective tooling then I hope that people understand the predicament they are in and also support the server in their efforts and try to understand their reasoning.

At least you don't have to switch to another platform, you can just make an account on the instance and participate.

I have been toggling between instances and accounts per instance for a good week already and I encounter zero problems with it.

If you just make an account and "activate" the keep yourself logged in checkmark than you can easily switch between instances.

In this stage we are self governing to an extent. The behaviour of people can affect a full instance so everyone has the obligation to think before they post.

Just don't be a dick/troll/spammer/bigot is more then enough to keep federating for your instance enabled.

salmacis,
salmacis avatar

To be fair, that's how things used to be on the internet. You'd sign up for various forums or message boards with different accounts. Then it all became consolidated under one roof, and message boards started dying. What's happening with reddit now shows the danger of that.

ppptan,
ppptan avatar

It'd be nice if there were some way to link accounts across different instances

epyon22,

It's a decent argument to host your own instance just for your self and not having to shuffle subscriptions around

ppptan,
ppptan avatar

I wish there was a turnkey solution for this

epyon22,

I haven't looked into it but I've heard it's pretty good docker, or otherwise. Self hosting is not quite at the masses yet but this sounds like one of the easier ones

useful_idiot,

Brilliant.

Braggston08,
Braggston08 avatar

Yeah there will never be a perfect middleway. Either you have a lot of small kingdoms where sometimes some of them go rogue or you got one big one where the Leaders literally rule the whole place.
I think feddiverse will be the better option in the long run after some things get tweaked a bit more.

Deref,

Bluesky has a global identity system where instance accounts are just links to a DID (basically your private key). If you get banned from an instance you have to change your name but you keep all your posts and likes.

stephenc,

I'm personally OK with the old-school way of one account per community/server. All I really want is forums with (1) a nice clean UI, (2) nice mobile app, and (3) open APIs. Most popular forum software meets only one, or even none of these. Lemmy has all three of these. Federation is maybe nice icing on the cake, but I could take it or leave it personally. Maybe that's denying the whole point of Lemmy, but I don't care.

useful_idiot,

Client apps will likely end up managing signup and credentials automagically. We already do it for certain/acme.

homelabber,

If I'm not mistaken both Beehaw and Lemmy.world are pretty big mainstream instances.

Why has Beehaw decided to stop federating with lemmy.world?

homelabber,

Ok so apparently it's a pinned post in their community.

Tldr Lemmy.world has open registration, which means more trolls/extremists and they are tired of dealing with them.

Mountaineer,
@Mountaineer@lemmy.world avatar

The stated reason is that there's too many bad actors coming from here, so it's too hard to moderate:

https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Hopefully (as they state in their post), federation will resume once things settle into a new norm.

Or I forsee beehaw losing relevance as it continues to pursue an isolationist policy.

homelabber,

Thank you!

A scary thing about the Fediverse right now is that some instances have many of the bigger communities. And the owners of the instance can literally shut it down at any moment (or stop federating with you).

And right now there isn't an incentive to keep instances alive.

tumulus_scrolls,

May be worth keeping some local communities in that case, which can also serve as sort of backup for wider community from other small servers. For example, if there is "Knitting" on a big instance, you can consider creating something more specific like "Knitting full RGB sweaters" on your smaller instance. Then there is a basis for sustained discussion there, and more people can come if something breaks. I have some ideas for comms like this that I'll maybe come around to creating.

I don't think we need to keep full centralization be-where-everyone-is mentality here. Or maybe be where everyone is, but don't make it the only place where you talk with people.

homelabber,

True, I'm not really concerned about the active users dissapearing, because most of them would just join the second biggest community about that topic.

I'm more concerned about the ammount of information/knowledge that would be lost.

I get what you say about not having a be-where-everyone-is mentality. But the fact is that following 15 communities about the same topic is really inconvenient, and people tend to congregate (look at how many users each instance has and you'll see that a few instances have like 80% of the total users).

If we want the fediverse to succeed we have to simulate centralization for a better user experience, while being decentralized. And that means that there should be some sort of protection to prevent whole communities from dissapearing.

tumulus_scrolls,

Yeah, I'm not disagreeing there is a convenience and ease angle, but I think there's a middle ground where we have 2-3 communities for major interests with somewhat different vibes or approaches, so there is a topic reason for them coexisting. This already happens in the old school forums ecosystem. Fediverse's advantage here is that you hopefully don't need separate accounts.

Re: loss of knowledge, if some instance/community does a purge, I'm assuming the old posts are still there, at the very least on the instances that used to be federated with them. I suppose it would be a nice to have a feature for admins for "freezing" their public backups of mirrored communities when they get defederated. It's not that different of a scenario from standard Internet drama, we just have to handle this nicely.

I agree with other people that the right to defederate is to be respected. If we rely on one hub community somewhere to congregate, this is only kinda decentralization. At the very least the central hubs shouldn't be on instances that are too defederation-happy.

On the other hand, I see the argument that many users means more difficult moderation, where defederation might be a band-aid as they say on beehaw. The question is if they have too ambitious moderation goals to handle being a central hub, and maybe indeed it would be better for their communities to be sort of internal to them.

homelabber,

On Mastodon there's a self-destruct command that in theory deletes your content from all of the instances that are federated with you. I thought the same command was on Lemmy but it might not be the case.

Then you would be right that the old posts should remain on the federated instances.

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