this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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I agree with a number of these complaints. I'm migrating over from reddit and I'm having a number of issues similar to what was posted.
Here's my experience.
OK the blackout started, I moved Apollo and Narwall to page 2 of my phone so I don't muscle memory click on them. I google lemmy because that's what people were talking about switching too before the blackout. I get linked to a page that says lemmy is a bunch of instances and it doesn't matter which one you join. ok.... but which one do I join? I goto the instance page and sort by which server has the most users and is in my country. Beehaw it is I guess. Let's sign up. Oh there's a form you have to answer questions about why you fit here and a human is going to approve me (still waiting on that one). Lets see which one has open registration, Lemmy.World. I try registering and it just spins (still does, tried it again today in firefox, safari, and edge). OK well lets keep trying until we get one to work (lemmynsfw.com was the winner at the time and since then I got an account at https://sh.itjust.works).
OK I'm in and I'm on a NSFW instance but I'm looking for technology, news, and politics. OK communities ALL, which technology do I join (Beehaw, lemmy.ml, midwest.social)?
It took me almost a day to get setup and the top search results on the issues I was facing all linked to reddit pages I wasn't going to click on.
I'm setup now and looking forward to things getting sorted out (there will be clear winners we all migrate to). I really don't understand the benefit of being federated. I honestly would prefer a single site that's a nonprofit similar to wikipedia but I'll be using this for now.
The benefits of federation are vast, and the downsides are temporary, all of your issues are currently working to be solved.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
Also, as for picking which technology to use, why would you not just use the most subscribed?
Federation is just harder to bulid in the first place, that's why you're having any problems at all, the devs are ironing out all of this, and there's going to be better solutions for all of this, you're at the dawn of the lemmy fediverse, it's not mature and you shouldn't expect it to be.
We need federation for our future, if you don't want a single corporation to control all the content on a website, you should value this, over the minor annoyances that are currently happening (BUT ARE NOT FUNDAMENTAL)
If an instance is federated, competition is automatic, look at what happened to reddit, right? Do you want that to happen again? If not, you should value federation, all of that is completely prevented by lemmy with little to no downsides for the end user (long-term).
Yes, you're experiencing problems with federation now, but they're actively working to solve these things, and once they're solved, you'll end up with a version of reddit where you'll never have to worry about anti-user changes being implemented, or even pro corporation propaganda.
It's more fundamental than just the api thing, reddit is literally designed in a malicious way because it's goal is to make money off of you, lemmy is not.
You really have to look at the bigger picture here and realize the problems you're listing are both minor and solveable, and while they are related to federation, the problem isn't federation, it's that lemmy isn't very mature.
The benefit is to prevent this from being the next Reddit. Being a nonprofit doesn't really guarantee anything in the long term. OpenAI was a non profit and now it isn't... Rather than trust a single entity to not abuse its power, federation aims to not give any entity all the power to begin with.
It also solves practical problems. Which single benign entity would pay for the servers and internet connections to become the new reddit? I don't think there is one.
Honestly I'm fine with the current process. A site exists for a decade, collapses when it has to be profitable and we all move to the next one. Reddit was my replacement for Digg which was a replacement for slashdot. I'm fine moving every decade to the new site if everything is in one place and easy to use.
That said, I'm sure this platform will be fine once someone makes an app like Apollo to streamline it and 99% of people go to one instance for technology and one instance for politics. I didn't switch to reddit when it came out (I hated it). I switched when digg became garbage and reddit was the better alternative. I think that will be the case with this as well for most people.
Fair enough. I think it would be more accurate to say that you don't care about the benefits of federation, rather than there not being any.
But it while you feel fine with the "current process" clearly from an end-user perspective, it's worth considering how the process might harm you too indirectly. Some communities, especially niche ones, might not survive a migration. An enormous amount of information might eventually get lost if the old site dies or pivots to something that doesn't retain all the content.
And then there's all the things that can go wrong with giving all our data to a single entity. Maybe sometime in the future we find ourselves dependent on AI services and they go to shit. Now it's not obvious that we can keep migrating every decade because only a select few tech giants have the big data required to create competing services. And that sucks because we're the ones who generated it and gave it away.
Hopefully, the streamlining of the fediverse, which I agree needs to happen, will not be everyone signing on to the same instance, but rather the federation working great and the interfaces feeling so seamless that the average user feels like everything is in the same place without it really being so.
Those are all fair points. I do think these kinks can be worked out. I guess I'm just being impatient because I don't think the reddit blackout is going to make spez back down which means I'll need to find an alternative platform by the end of the month when narwhal stops working for me.
I don't browse Reddit on mobile, but I feel for you guys that do. It must suck. I also don't think spez will back down, and a transition to Lemmy or other platform will certainly take long, if it happens at all. It's just so likely that things will suck for a while...
The problem with the multiple redundant communities is real, but it's also real on Reddit. It's just that Reddit has been around for much longer and there has been time for everyone to reach a consensus on which community is the real one. And even then there's different ones still. Is it workreform, antiwork, or workabolition you're looking for? Or for something with less of an ideological debate behind the separation, is it tabletopgamedesign or boardgamedesign?
It's a little different than having "news" vs "worldnews" though, right? You could have 20 communities called "news", and they all have different content as I understand it.
Yes, news and worldnews are different things. But the ones I mentioned above are the same thing, different subreddits. Like me_irl and meirl. No reason for there to be two, but there are.
So sure, maybe the Federation thing makes it even more common. But it's not a new problem, and it mostly self corrects. People gravitate to the bigger community. The smaller community will get some strays asking why there is not much movement here, and somebody will reply because we're all at this other place and then the next stray sees the message and doesn't even have to ask.
Additionally if the main community declines in quality I'd expect users to migrate