One Small step, a giant leap for Fediverse but...
One Small step, a giant leap for Fediverse but...
Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc.... and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That's soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how "signup anywhere, its the same thing" evolves.
I'm new here, can someone explain how this whole federating thing works?
Why did you post this to selfhosted? lol
that i just realized, lol
The instance you sign up on doesn't really matter. For technical people, the server you sign in on, can be important, but for the average user it doesn't. In fact, you could make an account on mastodon.social and comment on this very thread. That's pretty much the goal of federation.
This feels disingenous to say. Each community has its own rules and culture, which you may agree or disagree with. Beyond that, there's the matter of trust as the instance admin holds everything on their server. This isn't even getting into the whole mess of defederation. like with Beehaw, who seems intent on forming an isolative culture despite having some of the largest communities on the site.
I believe it will improve over time as the Fediverse matures and grows to handle larger loads and less techy people, but I think saying that to people will do more harm than good. A lot of the newer people have been reasonably freaking out in response to losing access to several large communities they frequented because they were told "instance doesn't matter", when quite frankly it does at the moment.
Entirely fair, we are in the midst of significant drama between the reddit burndown, and the infancy of the lemmy platform as a whole. For someone wanting to talk to people, and get their feet wet in the fediverse, I think its reasonable to say that the server doesn't matter. Once you have used the platform, and know what you want then exploring the options is highly encouraged. The exact circumstances of server federation will absolutely change, probably a lot, in the near future.
I treat it akin to someone saying "I want to learn how to play guitar." I think reasoanble advice is get a cheap used guitar and start learning cords. Once you know if you plan on sticking with it more than a few weeks, go right ahead and start looking at better equipment. I don't think expecting someone at this stage to start taking musical theory is the best advice. Maybe that is a weak argument, but I don't think its entirely wrong.
I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷♂️I don't want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it's beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.
What federation issues were you having with aussie.zone? I used that one for a while before creating my own instance.
The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.
By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to !australia@aussie.zone AND upvote boobs.
If I'm not mistaken both Beehaw and Lemmy.world are pretty big mainstream instances.
Why has Beehaw decided to stop federating with lemmy.world?
Yea. I feel like Beehaw cutting a lot of the larger general communities out from two of the biggest instances is highlighting early a major hurdle that’s gonna make the whole fediverse thing difficult to get a lot of people on board with. I don’t want to have to keep making new accounts to access stuff, but like… half of the communities I had subscribed to are just gone now because the admins over there decided they don’t want to play with anyone else, I guess.
To be fair, that's how things used to be on the internet. You'd sign up for various forums or message boards with different accounts. Then it all became consolidated under one roof, and message boards started dying. What's happening with reddit now shows the danger of that.