Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
I’m quite worried of how well this federation system will work in the long run, especially when more people coming from Rexxit. As people make more post/comments, every federated instance will have to cache more redundant contents from each other, which also will use more storage thus increasing the fee of every instance hoster. There’s also another problem of visibility in search engines. Because Lemmy/Kbin can be hosted by anyone, it makes searching on a specific domain impossible, unlike how I can just add “reddit” in the search query. Also since there are multiple Lemmy/Kbin instances, there’s a chance there’ll be similar communities spread over, fragmenting the communities even further. Until they can find a way to fix those problem, I don’t think federation is suited for large scale communities.
As for fragmentation problem, maybe adding a global search for communities like this will help reducing fragmentation. Users can still make their own community in their instance, while other people who don’t need to can easily find the community they want.
After a day of use, I’m incredibly disappointed.
The fragmentation problems, and lack of cohesive community discovery (or even apparently any agreed standards for sharing communities etc. across instances in a way the most popular app can reliably recognise as being a community and not an external link or mailto address) will make Lemmy an absolute non-starter for 99% of potential users.
I’m sure there are solutions, but as it stands I can’t see Lemmy gaining any widespread adoption without a significant leap in user friendliness in regard to how federated instances are implemented and managed.
I don’t see fragmentation as a problem at all. The number of total subscribers is published when doing a search and is the ultimate primary consolidator just like reddit. There were many redundant subs on reddit for any given subject, they just had no patronage. The process of establishing primacy takes time. Three days ago .world had less than 1k users and all of Lemmy had less active users than half those present on any one of several instances right now. The .world instance is 10 days old.
The priorities of decentralized service will not align with the antithesis model. I see a minor complexity barrier to entry as a positive filter for some of the worst quality users.
Agreed. If decentralized doesn’t appeal to certain people then this isn’t for them. I came from reddit. I’m not trying to make this into reddit.
I initially felt the same way after a day or so of use, however once I got the app and figured out the clunkyness and rough edges it’s really grown on me.
You’re definitely right about discoverability but you’re probably comparing this to Reddit that’s had like 15 years to mature and sort it all out. Lemmy is made by like 2 developers for free and it’s pretty impressive already what they’ve achieved.
I think if you give it more time and lower your expectations a little you’ll appreciate it more. And you don’t have to leave Reddit or whatever either, you can just use both and see what happens too.
I haven’t even been using it for day, and I share your disappointment. However, I understand that Lemmy is in its infancy. There are huge UX hurdles to overcome, and it’s a lot for two developers to carry. The hope is that more devs will join, and make a good UX – For what it’s worth, the UI is quite neat IMHO, it’s just the UX with regards to federation and discoverability.
Having a ways to add instances and then replicate community lists would be a start. Having to manually fiddle with URLs of other communities is weird.
What there needs to be is concerted development focus on fixing these quality of life issues. Unfortunately, there was not much time allowed for this to happen seeing as it was about a week or two from the announcement to the start of the blackout. These things take time and development time isn’t always available.