I’ve introduced two of my friends (not into tech) to Lemmy. Since they’re not into tech this is their first web forum.
I’ve explained the federation thru the usual email metaphore and that’s ok, but to lookup for communities is not quite there on client side.
Let me explain.
He wanted to see all the communities on an instance because that instance is in his native language but he’s registered on another instance. So to see all those communities you must go on instance.domain/communities, copy the name of the community you are interessed in and paste it inside the app/web client to look it up.
And to see all the communities all over the fediverse you must use lemmyverse.net which is a cool site, but still you got to copy paste back and forth to the app.
This could be implementend inside app itself by listing all communities and add ability to filter by things like instance.
Obviously open to discussion about the issue itself and how that could be improved.
Feel free to tag apps/clients devs to ear their opinion too.
I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.
Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.
But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.
Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.
I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)
But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.
A lot of this doesn’t work easily on the activitypub model, because accounts and posts and communities live on their host instances, and every interaction has to be relayed to them and updates have to be retrieved from them.
While you can set up mirrors with arbitrary additional moderation that can be seen from everywhere, you can’t support submission of content from instances blocked by the host instance.
The bluesky model with content addressing can create that experience by allowing the creation of “roaming” communities where posts and comments can be collected by multiple hosts who each can apply their own filtering. Since posts are signed and comment trees use hashes of the parent you can’t manipulate others’ posts undetected.
Bluesky already has 3rd party moderation label services and 3rd party feed generators for its Twitter-like service, and a fork replicating a forum model could have 3rd party forum views and 3rd party moderation applied similarly.
But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.
You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.
Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.
