this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Fediverse

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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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What do you think some of the fediverse's primary stumbling blocks are? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, what's stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?

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[–] modulus@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The biggest issues for me are:

  1. No centralisation means there's no canonical single source of truth.
  2. Account migration.
  3. Implementation compatibility.

No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set--and only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.

Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.

Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).

[–] Rescuer6394@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set--and only if there are no suspensions involved.

that should not be true. if all the instances involved in a comment section are fully federated with each other, the comments are the same on all of those instances.

things get complicated when there is defederation involved.. but the base case is "everyone can see the same set of comments no matter the instance."

is this correct or there is more?

[–] Lucia@eviltoast.org 3 points 1 year ago

things get complicated when there is defederation involved

More of that, only comments from instances defederated by your instance won't be shown.

[–] modulus@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

As far as I can tell, this is incorrect. If there's a post on instance A, a reply from instance B, and someone on instance C follows the OP on A but not the RP on B, they will only see the OP without the reply.

Source: I very often notice this because I run a single-user instance, and when I open a thread it's incomplete, lacking posts from instances that I have not suspended.

[–] Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No centralisation means there’s no canonical single source of truth.

I don't think this is a bad thing. Having centralization leads to one narrative taking over the post. With more decentralization, there is a natural way for different kinds of conversation to take root.

Also, this is going to occur much more when people get the ability to block instances anyway.