@fediverse Let's face it. When talking about the Fediverse, it is very hard to sell interoperability between different types of instances as a major advantage.
People are interested in communities and content. The idea of using one single client and being able to access all types of content from any kind of instance sounds great, but it's still a dream. Let's say that I am interested in memes and the communities I know of are most active on lemmy.world. Realistically, with my Mastodon account I am not going to have the same experience that I would have with using Lemmy just for that. I need to register a new account on lemmy.world.
@fediverse 2. In most of the cases I have experiences, Mastodon is the only one that has a good level of stability that allows for active consume of content present on other intances. "Content is almost instantly federated", and I guess this is because Mastodon has a lot of users and therefore a lot of instances federated. In my opinion, this gives more value to the local timeline, as it correctly reinforces the idea that instances should be the community of your own choosing.
@fediverse Mastodon is the level of UX other projects should aim to. Unfortunately, others like Pixelfed and Lemmy are still not as adopted, and profiles can not communicate that well. This makes the on-life experience of making a friend create a new account and adding you very painful, because different servers might not be synced and the content of your profile might not appear in their client. This makes people to join large instances so they can have everyone in their local timeline.
@fediverse So, these problems break the whole idea of having one profile for accessing all the available content on the Fediverse. In general, this can be described as one major problem: even if my chosen instance is federated with some other where the content I am interested in is available, I will still have some issues in accessing.
@fediverse Again, maybe I was only very unlucky with the instances I chose to let my friends sign up for the Fediverse, but we really need to think on how to make this as effortless as possible for new users. Changing paradigm is not easy, making everyone grasp the underlying concepts of the Fediverse is not easy, increasing adoption is not easy. We can not rely on another Xpocalypse.
@fediverse The point is that, given the current characteristics and limitations of the Fediverse at large, how should we recommend software to people interred in joining?
Should we aim to have them use only one software/instance given their interests? i.e. I'm interested in having the most similar experience to Instagram, so I should use ONLY Pixelfed? But what if, like me, I want to have an official presence online and still want to interact with other communities online that are thread-based?
@youronlyone@fediverse This is a great suggestion. So, as you correctly are saying, there must be a focus on the user and their needs. I think a wizard could be useful (but not like https://distrochooser.de , because options are limited, same results).
This hypothetical wizard should allow the user to choose between software and instances, based on a set of characteristics.
I think we lack something like this. Am I wrong?
@youronlyone@fediverse Thank you for pointing that out. You expressed it way better than me. I agree. That's why probably we need to recommend different software to different users.
@ShellMonkey To be honest, I totally agree. Again, it boils down to the type of needs you have as a user. I want to have a personal profile where I can post stuff I've written, doing campaigning, share stuff about events I've participated to, and so on. That would be a profile I hand out on business cards and such.
At the same time, I love content/link aggregators, as that is the way of interacting online I find most interesting.
TLDR; I'm still in the search of the best software for my needs.
@root_beer@fediverse I understand the point, but what if there are different needs and use cases? Like a network of schools in a specific region that want to coordinate, interact and share events among them?
@brome Yeah, we are experimenting with different software in order to have something a little bit more "2023" than a Wiki. I mean, Wikis are super cool, but it would be fun to also have that social media part added to it
@brome Regarding the "failed federation", I'm supposing that there might be something off with how Apache2 is configured, since a similar behavior presented when I was testing Lemmy. Since I believe ActivityPub and federation is almost universal for every software in the Fediverse, isn't there a comprehensive and interoperable guide on how to set up reverse proxies?
@brome I've set up a Synapse server in the past and I had to specify about the .well-known path in nginx for the Webfinger protocol, so I guess there might be something similar involved. I am looking for Fediverse scientists here lol :blobfoxwave: :blobfoxsciencewoozy: