With previous Rexit’s like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.
What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?
With previous Rexit’s like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.
What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?
As a new user (I started using PieFed 2 months ago), the UX can surely be improved, but I feel like the main issue is relative to how users are supposed to use the fediverse: I still don’t have a clue on how the fediverse works and how to use it properly.
And I’m motivated in learning to use it.
But for someone who isn’t motivated, it’s a huge “no thanks, goodbye”
I think we should just hide all of that complexity and just set defaults for everything that the user can decide to change if they want.
BlueSky has 40+ million users, and it’s also technically decentralized like the Fediverse.
aka. you can use the eurosky.social or bluesky.social server etc.
Can BlueSky really be called decentralized when 99% of it is bluesky.social?
No, that’s why I said it’s technically decentralized.
They have 40 million users though, they focused on UX first, and will now hopefully not be dicks and actually become decentralized
Not a chance unfortunately, bluesky doesn’t work without an all-seeing-eye that brings people the content they want. At best there will be some satellites running on atproto, fully decentralized, but the core will still be bluesky and it will still be completely centralized
That is probably true, I do wish for a future where people can migrate to say https://www.eurosky.tech and alternatives, while benefiting from having so many users already
It’s not decentralized although it tried really hard to be.
I don’t want to google/remember the exact details but IIRC basically they run a centralized identity server that is impossible to avoid. At best, you can set up an island instance that doesn’t federate with BlueSky proper (like Truth Social vs Mastodon).
I’m not sure what can really be done about that; the fediverse is, by its very nature, pretty complicated. It’s at least as complicated as http or email, and those things are widely used but probably not that well understood by the average person.
I think people are accustomed to using things that they barely understand the inner workings of (car, microwave, computer, etc.) during their daily life. So, I guess my question is, to what degree do people need to know “how the fediverse works” in order to use it?
If anything, we probably have to change the way we talk about the fediverse to make it more streamlined for people. For example, instead of suggesting that people “join lemmy”, it would be better to send them directly to a specific instance that we would like to see grow.
Then there’s the friction of actually joining an instance. Some instances won’t let users view content without registering, and some require you to “apply” for registration, pending approval. Both of those things are reasonable and justifiable, but at the same time I think they do create a barrier of entry that we may not want if we are going to try to attract more users.
It reminds me of this:
But yeah making the process of signing up and using the fediverse easier for users will go a long way. As much as I dont like bluesky, one thing they did right over Mastodon is making the sign up process dead easy for end users.
Sure, but Bluesky did that by not really being federated at all, especially during the early rush.
Bluesky is certainly a step or two better than Twitter, but I would imagine it’s still de facto centralized around the main bsky.social server, as that’s what the vast majority of users are probably using.Nowadays it’s getting more federated, but it seems to still be very far behind where ActivityPub is.
So they avoided the challenges of federation by not really being federated in the first place. Mastodon doesn’t have that luxury, since it was fully federated and self-hostable from the start. There was no half step and nobody else to copy.
I find it really simple. I joined a site, I found communities, I posted.
It was honestly no different to using reddit, well without the spam and shitty far right losers.
There’s just one little hurdle: choose an instance when joining. Maybe it could just be some sort of “choose for me” and every instance gets equal new users, random. Of course with the option to “nope, I’ll choose instance myself”. Everything else is technical and a casual new user shouldn’t be bothered very much by it. Some are very interested and dig in to the knowledge, some just want to scroll cat pictures and call it a day, and that is fine too.
that’s kinda already how it works
https://join.piefed.social/ suggests you just join the default instance
https://join-lemmy.org/ gives a random default
I’d explain it like this:
Social media are built on ‘protocols’. Protocols tell e.g. social media what they can do and how to ‘talk’ to each other.
The Fediverse is a group of social media that use ActivityPub, Diaspora, or AT Protocol. These protocols allow something special that ‘traditional’ social media like Facebook and Instagram don’t: they can communicate across each other, without using a centralised server for hosting content.
It’s comparable to email; you can mail to someone not using your mail provider, and vice versa.
On one of these fediverse social media, people self-host or join a self-hosted group. Such a group is called an ‘instance’. Each instance functions independently and can have its own policies.
Instances (and users) can decide with which other instances they allow their own content to be seen. They can also decide what instances their users can see content from. An instance that is connected to another instance is said to be ‘federated’ with the latter. If that is not the case, they are ‘defederated’.
Within each instances, there are many communities. There’s a community for Linux, a community for cat pictures, a community for nature, and so on.
View the fediverse like a few forests, linked by many wild bridges. Lemmy might be one forest, Peertube and Mastodon yet other ones.
An instance is like a single tree. And a community a branch. Users are leaves.
Some parts of the fediverse allow these leaves to leave and join another tree.
Traditional social media, on the other hand, are comparable to a single, isolated and big tree, far away from other trees. You cannot jump to other trees, cannot easily go to a forest.
Would that be a good explanation?
Wow, thanks a lot, this is the best explanation that I was able to find so far!
Welcome to PieFed! I see you’ve got an account and you know how to post comments. What else do you need help with?
it’s weird that, because once you’re in it’s basically seamless. it’s just that first step of picking a server based on your interests that trips people up, because aren’t you supposed to pick interests after you get in? more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
I have never understood the importance of choosing an instance, especially at the beginning. Sign up for any one, try it for a while and if you need to change later, you can do so without problems.
On sites like mastodon where followers are essential it can be a problem, in lemmy where karma is not even accumulated, changing servers does not make you lose more than the 5 minutes it takes you to do it
It’s a bit of a faff to export and import your followed community list
I have changed instances several times and it seems to me to be the simplest mechanism humanly imaginable.
For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you’re not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.
The paradoxical situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.
Why would you use local as a source of recommendation instead of all? I find using the local tab very limiting, it will never be as complete as all my tastes and hobbies
https://piefed.zip/explore
https://piefed.zip/feeds
Tbf piefed.zip doesn’t have much of a local so that makes sense for you, but the user above is on feddit.org, which is a long-running German-language (at least prominent) instance so it does make sense for them in that context if they’re German.
That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D
yeah but, again, it’s seamless. my instance only hosts content in swedish, but that’s not really a problem. sorting by scaled means i still see things that happen locally mixed in with everything else.
I’m on my 4th instance. Dropped my first be cause of old Lemmy’s autorefreshand other issues. 2 and 3 died as maintainers went away. I had to start over from zero again each time
More instances with minimal/no defederation would help. That way you can just tell people to pick one of those instances and it doesn’t matter which one.
PieFed.zip is very new-user friendly (see very minimal instance blo ck list). I don’t see the requirement for an endless barrage of new instances being a blocker - the amount that we have now is sufficient to handle far more capacity than the entire Threadiverse is currently capable of demanding from the servers.
Quite the opposite: most stories I see about people talking about the Threadiverse is how toxic AF we are, and elitist leftists, not welcoming to liberal centrists e.g. in the USA. So if the goal were to bring on more people from Reddit (setting aside for the morning whether that is truly a worthwhile aim), then more censorship of toxicity is what would more readily make that happen, not less moderation. e.g. one glance at hexbear and your average Redditor will never come back here again:-P.
I disagree, you def would need to block the worst places. A good new-user friendly instance would block far-right and authoritarian content.
PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach: it blocks the most controversial instances but not as defederations i.e. at the instance level, and instead does so automatically for every new account upon sign-up, then sends the user a message explaining how to remove that block. From there they can unblock, reblock, back and forth as they choose at will. It thus makes federation with hexbear and Lemmygrad as opt-in rather than opt-out or obligatory or neglected as all other instances across the Threadiverse do.
I do not recall if it does this for lemmy.ml as well - I would suspect not, sadly, but then again it would be fairly unique in that respect if it did, as virtually no major instances do so.
And as far as far-right instances, those do not really exist, though nonetheless the historical ones are in the defederation list (exploding heads, freespeechextremists, and ofc threads.net:-P), and surely over time new instances could be added as well.
Finally I will add that I’ve never seen the tiniest hint of documentation for any of this - not in https://piefed.zip/defed_policy, or the welcome messages in their !announcements@piefed.zip or !home@piefed.zip local communities, and now I don’t see their listing anywhere in the instance picker site, despite trying multiple host instances of that including themselves. I only know about this since I too questioned how Newbie-friendly any instance was that federates with the above-mentioned pair, and the instance admin told me about this, but even now months later I still don’t see an official description written down about this somewhere easily accessible by people.
The Threadiverse is still very much a Work-In-Progress! But… it’s getting better, and PieFed.zip is a major part of that progress, it looks to me.
i mean maybe. i initially chose one of those instances for mastodon, but it turns out when you don’t defederate from anyone, others defederate from you because you act as a proxy for the nazis and pedos to reach other instances. so i couldn’t talk to my friends. it’s a bit of a hassle.
What do you think about https://phtn.app/ ? Sadly the PieFed support is in Beta for quite a while now, but I do like how clean everything looks. You can also hide away a lot of the complexity but I am not sure if that is the default.
I didn’t know it, and I’m trying it. The UX is really nice, though I don’t understand why I needed to submit the reasons why I wanted to subscribe, and why I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities… But thanks for the suggestion!
That is odd, normally you are only asked for a reason when you sign up for a new account and not when you just subscribe to a community. Can you share the community you were trying to subscribe?
My bad choice of wording, they asked me for reasons during sign up, not subscribing to communities. Anyway, thanks for the explanation, any chance you can share also android apps? I’m currently using Summit linked to my PieFed account
Im not sure if you are aware but you do not have to create a new Account on there. Photon is another client just like Summit is, so you can login using your piefed.social account. Sadly im not on android anymore but will be coming back soon! There are couple to choose from, just from the looks i like sync and interstellar but im not sure how well they support piefed. Lemmy was first so it was first supported.
https://join.piefed.social/docs/piefed-mobile/ https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app