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?
The biggest problem to me, seems to be the lack of ability to block people, communities, and instances. It’s built into some apps, but really needs to be part of the platform.
I block all porn instances, for example.
There is this trend of mass downvoting your account if you disagree with political propaganda on any spectrum and they follow any instance. We need a workaround for mass downvoting.
I’m a little surprised across the responses so far that there’s been no mention of the adoption of or migration to a fediverse platform of some prominent creatives or communities.
It’s understandable why they haven’t given many of the issues already mentioned thus far, but in terms of others jumping in to federated services, among the least technical stumbling blocks by far is probably the absence of those (or those communities) they’d like to continue following (or participating in) here. Some of that may fall under discoverability/onboarding & content or critical mass mentioned, but it still caught my eye that it wasn’t specifically mentioned.
I suppose by its lack of specific mention this mightn’t be seen as being as much of an issue?
I talked about this with someone else a few days ago. Professional content creators aren’t going to like the Fediverse very much, as the decentralization fundamentally means that there’s going to be a smaller audience for them to reach due to users being more spread out between instances in addition to the lack of ads and recommendation algorithms to spoonfeed their content to new viewers. There’s really no reason for them to prefer the Fediverse over the centralized corporate platforms that basically cater to their use-case. I don’t think it works as a profession here, at least in its current form. The Fediverse is good for hobbyists and everyone else though, whom I happen to prefer for the most part.
There’s really no reason for them to prefer the Fediverse over the centralized corporate platforms that basically cater to their use-case.
Wouldn’t a couple, maybe niche admittedly, reasons be less advertiser-influenced rules/moderation and in certain cases more control? E.g. YouTube’s notorious for its algorithms affecting views abruptly & near inexplicably, whereas something like PeerTube (or for streaming, Owncast) lacks those and enables less restricted content (fewer worries about automatic ContentID noise).
Similar situation with Pixelfed instances not having to fret over folks post nudity 'cause advertisers supposedly don’t like their adverts next to nudity in some regions. Don’t get me wrong, I see where you’re (and they’re) coming from on this, you go where the audiences are & where, give or take, certain features play to your benefit (i.e. recommendation algorithms), but I’ve also seen so many creators also chafing against the awkward antics of the corporate platforms, be it YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles?
For Lemmy:
- Onboarding. Newcomers should not have to decide which instance to use. They know nothing to make that decision. An algorithm should make an educated guess. Even a random pick might be better than forcing them to choose. Manual choice should still be available as an advanced signup method, but the default should be as quick and simple as possible.
- Account Migration. The lack thereof only increases the pressure for making a good choice for your first instance. If we could easily migrate accounts, this would also ease the signup burden. 3rd party tools exist, but this should be a core feature.
- Discovery. There exist dozens of tools for discovering communities, which shows how bad the built-in search function is. This should be a core feature with no need for 3rd party tools. I should not have to care wether someone else from my instance already searched for the same community or wether I’m the first.
- Stream Aggregation. I signed up to loads of niche communities (which do get new posts), but never see any of those in my stream, no matter which mode I choose. I even started to unsubscribe from big communities to give smaller content a chance, to no avail. This effectively hides original and interesting content from view, and makes the overall experience more boring.
- Remote Instance Posts and Comments. When looking up a specific post or comment, I probably cannot do so while being logged in. Which means, I can read it, but cannot interact with it.
- Remote Instance Communities. When browsing the communities of another instance (for example, a themed instance like mander.xyz), I can only do so while being logged out. When I find an interesting community, I have to manually copy the link, search for it in another logged-in tab, find it again, to finally subscribe.
- Lack of Niche Content. It’s getting better, but we still have a long way to go. This probably needs more general growth, but some technical aspects (like Stream Aggregation, Discovery and Remote Instance Browsing) also make it harder for niche communities to gain traction.
- GDPR Compliance. A private person and a public institution (which publishes educational content and videos) explicitly mentioned to me that they cannot join Lemmy since Lemmy cannot assure GDPR Compliance. I don’t know wether that’s true, just reporting the reason.
Overall, it still requires significant willingness to either accept missing features and content, or jump through technical hoops to regain some.
My experience on other fediverse platforms was similar, which most often resulted in me staying away from that particular service for now.
@Spzi @ALostInquirer Stream aggregation would be huge for me. It’s the main reason I don’t spend as much time on lemmy.