In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:
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Lemmy needs DIDs.
No, not dissociative identity disorder, Decentralized Identities.
The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it's up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.
Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive "might not make it", and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.
This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn't a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.
*Banning the account could create the same issue.
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Communities need to federate too.
Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.
Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.
What do you think?
EDIT: There's been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.
It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.
I don't see the big problem in 1. Compare it to e-mail. If you want to switch provider you have to backup and restore your emails if you want to.
Nobody bats an eye that amiladresses contain a maildomain but with Lemmy everyone is used to the reddit way. Give it some time, people will get used to it.
The syncing and federation problems we are experiencing right now will get solved in the future, people will get used to the new naming scheme.
Point 2 is a great idea btw.
Notice how everyone pretty much uses gmail? If gmail goes down you lose access to everything, but it won't because it's google and they have money to throw at problems. That's not true for Lemmy (and we don't want that because it leads to Reddit 2.0 where all power is centralized).
There is also the additional issue of defederation, not just your instance stability. Like if you happen to be one of the 30k users on lemmy.world, or any of the smaller ones that got cut off from Beehaw because you trusted the "it doesn't matter where you make your account, it's all shared in the fediverse!" - if there's a constant risk Gmail decides to block all Hotmail users one day, creating a Gmail account in the first place seems like the safer bet.
Absolutely! Don't fool yourself into thinking this will be the only time this happens. Some instance owners will never be willing or able to manage their servers as well as the big players, and that means bad actors can creep into other instance through them!
Email servers getting blocked is definitely a thing that happens otherwise your inbox would be nothing but spam and email providers make sure that their users don't spam or they would get blacklisted by other providers. Email is inherently federated.
Back in the early 2000s it was still possible to run a mail server locally on a dialup line and have big mail servers accept emails saying "yo the return address for this is myaccount@bigmail.com", not using bigmail's outgoing servers, you can absolutely forget about doing that now. Back in those days I would also have 200+ spam mails per day, the situation was so untenable that nowadays you can't even get an email account without included spam filter unless you set up your own server.
Lemmy and the overall fediverse is not really in that situation yet, where actual commercial spammers make it a target, and the smaller hiccups and maybe a bit trigger happy beehaw admins just mean that when the shit deluge finally arrives, we'll have the tools to deal with it.
Email providers aren't likely to shut down. But from what I know instances may.
@someguy3
@DaughterOfMars @this_is_router
Large email providers aren't likely to shut down, but smaller ones might... which is the concern for users on instances. Having a way to export / import one's account to a new instance would be ideal; not sure how a decentralized ID might work but it would be exciting to have.
When moving to another mail provider, I can forward mails going to the old address to the new one.
When moving to another lemmy account (technically creating an unconnected second one), I have no way to be notified of replies to posts or comments I made with the old account.
There are a couple other use cases where the comparison doesn't really hold. My hopes are on Moving user profile to a new instance #1985, but it probably won't be implemented any time soon.
You're assuming that the reason for the move is not the old mail provider shutting down. If the old provider shuts down and you cannot somehow get their domain name, all mails sent to your old address will just vanish in the void (or even worse, be gobbled up by whoever owns the domain now, better hope there's no personal info in there that you wouldn't want in their hands).
But, is there a way to backup and restore? For example, in invididious (Hope devs keep it up with the hard work) you can export all your data to an OPML or json and import it in another instance. For mail it can be done through IMAP.
Taking an opportunity to post a lil off-topic because somecritter's finally supporting a touch of calm around here: yesss, give it some time, people. Give yourselves some time. Let things (and people) settle some before judging and pushing in every direction at once.
[General comment, not directed at anycritter in particular] It's getting kinda tiring that so many people are in a big huge rush around here expecting everything to be some form of "just right" right now. People don't seem to be giving themselves or others time to figure out what's going on, how things work, how things should work, and there's a ton of excitement and pushing for things to go this way or that way or whatever but most of them don't even seem to know what this place is, what federation means, how things work here, or even what instance they're on or posting to at any given moment. There's a lot going on that needs time to play out and it's not all going to be obvious to everycritter immediately.
This place (what should it even be called? This one is looking forward to having a useful name for federated-not-Reddit-thing :'D ) doesn't need to replace Reddit right now. There is time to work out what it is, what it can be, and what it should be. A bit of patience will enable sensible progress.