What do you think some of the fediverse's primary stumbling blocks are?
What do you think some of the fediverse's primary stumbling blocks are?
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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The biggest issues for me are:
- No centralisation means there's no canonical single source of truth.
- Account migration.
- 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).
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.
This is one of the ideal use cases for Solid, in development by MIT and Tim Burners-Lee. Basically, you host a central store of data, including one or more user accounts, and allow access to it from other services.
This was the original premise of app.net - a social service from years back. They built a “social backbone”. They offered you a single place where your identity and friends were housed. Other people could build apps on top of the backbone.
So you would join say a clone of Instagram and all your friends were still there. And your account still worked. Or they had a Twitter clone. Same deal. It was a single sign-on social account/identity/social graph that was separate from the apps. So things could just plug in.
Worked great. But it was a paid service. And came out right at peak Facebook so it died off.
Ooh neat. Too bad that it was paid. And centralized/private for that matter.
I'd be more comfortable with self-hosting my actual data somewhere, and just having an instance or the central store point to my data. I'd want to get to apply rules for who gets access to my data. It would be a lot easier to spin up a small data store with a few tools on it than a full instance.
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?
things get complicated when there is defederation involved
More of that, only comments from instances defederated by your instance won't be shown.
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.
Well, there's replication lag of course, but afaik you're right.
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.