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.
Regarding point 1- if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-
Things would go much smoother!
Pick an instance based on uptime, or hell, create your own instance.
Piling all of the eggs into a single basket is destined to result in failure.
That's the issue though. Without a locked identity on an instance, people will naturally choose the option they think is least likely to disappear in a few weeks.
Instances won't appear and disappear weekly. Maybe right now, but not in a few weeks or months from now. The dust just needs to settle.
Every service with open protocols that isn't centralized does the same and nobody has a problem with it, be it bulletin boards, IRC server or mail. You have multiple instances and can't use a service when your instance is down. Thats why we are using the bigger ones and don't run mailservers on our own. It is important that we could though.
We might disagree but I feel this is more a problem of getting used to it. In the end, we all want a decentralized solution, don't we? Having multiple instances is just a part of the fediverse, that's a pro not a con in my book.
No, that will always be happening. The only thing that will settle is that the trusted instances will become known and people will stop signing up for less trusted ones.
An instance closing is not as common as you think it is. And a good way for it not to happen is to not "saturate" the same three intances by registering only in them and chose smaller instances instead. Or, if you have the time and ability, create your own instance.
Many of the instances that close do sobecause they become too big for the admins to handle.
Do you really think the average person knows or cares about that? No, of course not. They will congregate on the most populous instance so long as it continues to support the traffic.
Then there should be more threads to make newcommers aware of this thing. That (to avoid relatively large intances) is one of the first things I learn when I had my first account on mastodon around 2018. It's common knowledge in other platforms and something that was explained to twitter refugees that came to mastodon and other microblogging fediverse project last year.
you don't have to join big intances to interact with the fediverse. Sometimes smaller intances have better and bigger federation than larger ones, which are often defederated from many instances over their problems moderating their users
I would agree with that.
Wonder if it would be possible to implement a PKI system, so that way, a user can download a private certificate, which would allow them to re-authenticate to their existing account, on a new server anytime they wanted to move around.
Edit- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3164
It could help too if maybe on the sign up page, if an instance is getting full, they suggest some instances that are less full to join. That way people can be guided without having to do research on their own (before they’ve even decided to commit to the fediverse)
The problem is nobody knows which smaller instances will stick around and which won't.
For sure. But beehaw in a good example of aggressive moderating (which is totally their right) that can limit growth and why a decentralized approach is necessary. There can’t be a single massive place for x content. It’s rife for abuse. Allow it to be categorized and decentralized where beehaw can contribute but in their own way and users outside of beehaw can index and participate with them and even other instances that maybe beehaw defederated.
https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2023/join-the-fediverse/
Not sure if it helps or not, but, I made that post earlier to assist onboarding a bit.
Nice. Thanks. I spent a good amount of time on a few links jsut mass adding communities of interest. Will just remove ones that don’t work out. No way to really organize or group them by topic though.
There is a github issue to allow communities to be federated-
Ie, this community can be hosted on multiple instances, for example.
That would help some too.
On a side note. Do you mind if i post your blog post in the sidebar on my instance (i already did, but can pull it down if you want, no one is looking at my site most likely)
Right now my instance isnt open. But given a possible surge coming on 7/1 I am chewing on opening it up to be a "user-only" federated instance. As in, no real communities, just a speed instance to setup an account and join other communities.
Not sure if im going to even do it, just thinking about it right now.
Feel free- Just do me a favor, if you come across some useful information we can share to others, please let me know and I will update it.
After reading some of the concerns from other various communities today, I ended up locking down my registrations to requiring both approval, and a valid email. I don't expect to get a ton of users, but, I wanted to reduce the chance of "Troll users" joining, and then giving my instance a bad name.... Or users posting content, which is not appropriate/illegal.
That is essentially what my instance is. The small handful of communities here, are either for my instance itself for me to share news, OR, communities related to some of my public projects.
Absolutely will. And thanks a bunch.
I'm having the same thoughts on registration. Require email at least to just...reduce throwaways and trolls. Mines application only because "closing" it is confusing as it just spins. And I may leave it to application only.
Same with NSFW content. I don't know of a good way to defederate some of those instances and track that. So i unchecked the box and tossed a disclaimer in. I really just don't want drama from my hosting provider. Just want a place people can login and go to some of the other instances that are more focused on curating content and communities. I just dont have time for that myself.
That is an easy fix! Just host behind cloudflare. Your ISP/Datacenter/etc can't see anything as the data is encrypted between lemmy <---> cloudflare.
I don't care if anyone posts NSFW content, AS LONG AS... its in a NSFW community and/or tagged NSFW. (AND, obviously not questionable/illegal)
Yeah. Strongly considering cloudflare for sure.
Would different parts of the community be hosted on different instances, thereby spreading out the burden? Or would the entire community be mirrored to each of the hosting instances, thereby providing backup security?
I've actually been wondering about that. For example, what if an instance with a popular community went down or defederated from everyone? Would all the content of that community be lost to everyone else? I'm guessing that under those circumstances one or more new communities would be started to replace the "lost" community, although things could get complicated if there were more than one trying to replace the original - or if the original community refederated after the replacement communities developed.
Absolutely. Multiple ways to address some of these issues. Hopeful for the future.
I don't think it's fair to call it "Aggressive Moderation". It's barely possible to moderate on Lemmy right now at all, and that's why they defederated. They simply cannot trust outside instances as much as their own, because they screen every user, and they can't keep up with moderation. Defederating is their only option until mod tools get better.
I mean. It’s clearly subjective and I’m not judging whatsoever. It’s their prerogative and frankly I think there are some positives to it. And if it helps their space then that’s all that matters. I’m just a control freak and want to be in control of my account, backups, location etc.
But if you weren’t one that’s a troll on one of these others and were cut off it’s a tough pill too. I get there’s no easy answer.
When I looked at the mod log I was seeing some instances where, imho, it seemed aggressive policing of symantics. Individuals were t necessarily being offensive or trolling, though their opinions may not have been well formed or fully thought out or in line with others there and were bounced. And again that’s their call.
I’m not saying I would do better. In fact it’s why I’m not open and EVEN if I open my instance I’m not gonna have communities. I have no interest in policing fools that argue in bad faith or just want to get their jollies off angering others.
Beehaw did nothing that isn't common in the fediverse. I know people that are new to all this may be shocked by Beehaw's decision, but defederating from intances that promote intolerant discourses or allow trolling is the way to keep an instance alive. People will end up suspecting and defederating from an instance that interacts with intances that allow or promote that type of content or behaviour.
Again. Its not a criticism of beehaw. Just kind of an example of you are who you associate with sometimes IRL, but in the fediverse. Its unfortunate and I understand why they are building what they are. I support that.
Its also a reason why having very large concentrated communities can be bad and why federation or de-centralization is important. But with that, it does appear we need some better tools for cross-instance moderation and cross-instance community grouping so that you can say...create a "technology multi-community" that includes technology@beehaw.org and technology@lemmy.ml and apple@whateverinstance.com or whatever etc. etc.
That would allow for decentralization but still give people the ability to browse them as one community and if you so happen to be registered on something like lemmy.world, then you cant see the beehaw.org content but can see the rest etc.
I signed up with lemmy.ca and I regret it. It doesn't load "all" content very well so I have to hunt to find content. Hopefully they will fix it.
We can only go up from here!
Also, cannot promise my instance is any better, but, your welcome to try it. https://lemmyonline.com/
Its working quite nicely today though.
It's not an instance problem, it's a Lemmy sorting/loading/ranking problem. It doesn't seem to show very well popular posts from other instances like beehaw or lemmy.ml.
Known issue, going to be fixed soon in the 18.0 release. Until then, just gotta sort by new.
Somehow I trust the individual instances to self regulate. When an instance thinks it should not grow any further at the moment, it can close for new registrations, and users will naturally flock to others which are still open. I don't see this as a responsibility of the users, and in case of users completely new to lemmy, I also don't see how they could make a reliably informed decision.
In all fairness- if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn't allowing new registrations.
That being said, those instances are overloaded. They have posted multiple threads on the issue already.
I think anyways the registration process should be dumbed down. Simple version:
This would balance the load between instances and make it much easier for newcomers to join.
I realize we were talking about slightly different views. You had a scenario in mind where people try to join a specific instance (for example because someone promoted that specific instance somewhere else), I was talking about https://join-lemmy.org/
I actually like that idea. It's simple, and effective.
That would be awkward in some cases. Say, if a non-Nazi ended up on a Nazi server by random chance.
You're right, situations can occur. But it's not a permanent thing. People can make another new account on an instance which they deem suitable after they have familiarized themselves with lemmy by spending some days or weeks in it. Expecting a bloody newcomer to choose a good instance isn't so far from random choice anyways.
Also tbh, I have little to no interactions with people from my instance. I subscribe to topics I care for regardless of where they are hosted. People like me would hardly notice they share a server with nazis, as each would flock to different communities.