Could federation be a turn-off for more 'mainstream' users?
Hey everyone, I'm honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that's because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it's safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I'd been a Reddit user since 2010 so I've witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel--less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There's other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a 'chatroom' versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, 'visit site--post to site--view content on site'.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far--hope to see it grow!
The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say "join lemmy', and they say, 'ok, what's the site?" and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they're already confused. That can then be explained 'It's like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn't hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides "I don't want to deal with this crap."
If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won't have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I'm very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it's been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there's no indication of what's going on during that time...it's just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn't have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.
These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you're in the New feed).
Honestly I think people are making it more complicated than it is. Like everyone tries to compare it to email, but guess what I don't know how email works either. And that's fine, I don't need to understand it. I type words, hit send, tech magic happens, and somebody reads more words. I'd say, just stop trying to explain the technical stuff behind lemmy.
I agree the servers with vetted sign-ups are a major hurdle. I tried behaw first, but I only gave it 15 minutes of waiting before trying to find a new server and now I'm here. I'd tell people to just go with specific open servers, create an account, and boom reddit replacement. The only other thing that needs explained is that some communities are on different servers, but that just means you hit "all" instead of "local" to search. Otherwise it's basically reddit.
My opinion is people need to stop trying to explain the fediverse in detail, nobody cares, nobody needs to know, it's just creating confusion. People don't know how any of their services work and don't care. Just tell them how to get setup in as painless a way as possible.
Yeah I just tell people to join lemmy.world or beehaw and look for "all" instead of local. If they're interested, they'll find out about instances later.
I tried behaw first, but I only gave it 15 minutes of waiting before trying to find a new server and now I’m here.
I gave it a couple of weeks, never got an email about whether my account was approved or denied. It was as transparent as mud. I mentioned it on IRC, and someone said "Oh just keep trying different servers." Initially when I looked at the list a lot of them expressed that they were for people of leftist political leaning, for various countries specifically, LGBTQ+, POC. Joining a server was a complicated process of "What do I join? Will I be welcome there? What is their process? Why am I not seeing any answer?"
Then there's finding communities. You can list them, and for all instances, but then it's quite a massive list to sort through. Searching is hit or miss, and depends on knowing that you have to specifically try to search all instances. Community names aren't super easy to discern so you have to try various forms of your search terms. And trying to do the "reddit like" syntax of /c/<area of interest> only works on your present server, so unless you know the exact name of the instance you want to try that community on to use the @<lemmy.instance> syntax, it won't work.
It's funny how all these things are either ignored or even ridiculed when not understood. I didn't understand crypto and nfts and mastodon. I ridiculed my SO about the first two but trusted he knew what he was doing and when i saw results and success I learned and got a bit involved myself just enough to add to my retirement. But it's funny, with Lenny he won't bother learning about it and makes fun of me for even mentioning it. He was sending me reddit links and I told him at the very least screenshot as I'm not clicking on those. I guess he'll come around eventually but until he understands how it works he will just get annoyed anytime I mention lemmy lol!
100% agree. I was a redditor for a decade, decided to try lemmy and heard beehaw was a popular one. Tried to sign up, saw they require manual approval with a reason and thought "well fuck" and assumed all servers were the same.
If it weren't for a reddit post a few days later mentioning that some don't require the approval, I would never have tried again
This bothers me a fair bit, I had a post about someone using comic sans as their programming font as the top post for days. Someone's wacky font choices are just not that interesting I'm sorry.
The issue is explaining it to them like that, just tell them the instance that you use or is the most popular one that is not shit, and when they go to the site, they will see the sign up button and they can join and learn from there. After joining an instance you can mostly use lemmy the same way as reddit, I already got my brother and gf to join and they are about as "normie" as it gets.
I mean, it's all about the client. As long as the client makes it seamless, it'll just feel like another sub/community, regardless of the instance it's on. They don't really need to care about or understand federation. Just sign up. Consume content. Ggez
I think this is where the crux of the matter is. It’s early days still for Lemmy, and where we are right now is great I feel.
However, the user experience for an average user is probably quite confusing. With other platforms you just go to the platform page, sign up, and done. Here you’re greeted with an explanation of the architecture, then you have to find an index of servers, and all that is probably quite overwhelming for some.
I spoke to my roomie about it, and he basically dismissed it saying “eh I might look into it when I have time to waste” - the platform simply wasn’t too approachable to him, and he is quite tech savvy!
Over time I think it might be good to maybe not abstract away, but at least be less in your face about the federation. Streamlining the user onboarding experience would go a long way I think.
I think this comment 100% reflects how I feel as well, and I especially agree with your roommate. I’m a decently tech savvy person as well and between learning about federation and overthinking which instance to join it took 20-30 minutes to join Lemmy. I think the people in my life who don’t enjoy stuff like this as much will need me to help set up Lemmy or they won’t join at all.
On Mastodon, a few weeks ago this topic was raised after the default mobile apps started to streamline signups for the "mastodon.social" server (equivalent to lemmy.ml here). Many were displeased by it, saying that "we cannot have only one big instance, it's Twitter all over again" and something on that line.
But I think it is a good thing, personally, especially since mastodon have an account migration feature. Let the people experience the service, then give them the choices. Other apps and servers use this approach (eg. Mammoth for Mastodon app, Vivaldi browser's instance...)
Lemmy is not as mature right now as Mastodon was during the Twitter migration. This is a challenge, but presents some opportunities for the devs and the community to see what works and what didn't work for all this federation thing. But it does have potential to be "mainstream".
Someone will eventually get smart and stop talking about the fediverse and just build their platform on the fediverse. Then, people will flock to that platform and it will happen to be fediverse connected, allowing people to share content via an open standard.
Yeah i think people don't really need to understand how the fediverse works but just use it. When it's properly integrated into the search it doesn't really matter if you know or not
The issue with bluesky is it creates its own proprietary protocol. Nothing else is compatible with it. Lemmy and Mastodon (and countless others) use the ActivityPub protocol.
This. I mean, you have to expect the community who built the thing to be excited by the thing, but if they want it to be a broader community, then the emphasis has to be on what gets the crowd engaged.
Having said that, I don't think this or any platform should try to be all things to all men. It should have an identity and a focus, and it may not be for everyone - other communities will be right for other people.
I agree. It was presented confusingly, and made me think it was a lot more complex than it was. After I chose a server, it basically isn't very different in experience from a non federated site.
If we had a better way to select a server (vs "here's a list, good luck!") Then I don't think it'd be an issue at all
I feel like the focus on explaining federation and the fediverse can be overwhelming and confusing for new mainstream users.
Instead of focusing on the technical details, it might be more helpful to simply direct them to a few major servers (instances) like lemmy.world, beehaw.org, and lemmy.ml and tell them to make an account (or lurk) and explore. The advanced features, namely being able to subscribe to communities in other instances, should be eased into it later.
That is something I think kbin.social has done a better job of. Yes, there are other instances of kbin, but new users are told start with that one and slowly branch out from there.
"The advanced features, namely being able to subscribe to communities in other instances, should be eased into it later"
I understand this and I would at first agree, but subscribing to communities is basically the most important thing and it's frustrating/deterrent to learn that it's on other websites and you can't directly subscribe just like you can on other websites like you might on Reddit or Facebook or any other aggregator
The fragmentation of communities needs to be addressed. The fact is that most people just want to consume content. There needs to be a client-side solution that helps less tech-savvy users to more easily consume content from similar communities.
Agreed. A sort of multireddit that combines similar communities is needed, though I don't know if that would be better served as something individual users make for themselves, or as an official combination made by multiple communities banding together.
reddit has fragmentation as well. I think over time the more popular ones will win out and less popular will sorta wither away. Gaming is a good example. Reddit has games, gaming, pcgaming,pcmasterrace, patientgamers, etc..
Seeing a similar rush to land grab here as well. Basically it'll sort itself out is my point and probably isn't much different from early days of reddit or hell even modern day reddit.
Federation should not be an issue for users, I think we could make the front-end hide most of the complexity that it brings. There are only a few things that are harder now:
discovering communities outside your own instance (this is now mostly done through a website that lists communities)
logging in when you receive a link to a post on another instance (you have to go to your own instance, login there, and search for the post again)
creating a community on another instance (this requires an account on the other instance to create the community, after that they can add you as a mod)
One of the things that could be improved is changing the login page to add least add something about Federation, so users won't try to log in on another instance with the credentials of their home instance.
Your second bullet point is the one I have wanted fixed badly as soon as I started using lemmy. I want there to be a small button at the top of posts that takes me to that same post but through the server where my account is. Idk how that would work though. Maybe a browser addon that remembers where my accounts live? I wish I had the knowledge to make that sort of thing.
Sorry I deleted and reposted this comment, having an issue I'm trying to figure out.
This would require a browser extension or a central redirection server (similar to how single sign on is implemented between multiple URLs). The central server approach won't really fit well with the decentralized concept, although that server only needs to know your Lemmy instance and will only redirect users.
A browser extension could easily inject some kind of button in the page, and it would be easy enough for the browser extension to know your own Lemmy instance. I'm not sure if there is an easy URL to a specific post on a certain instance though, for example this post is https://feddit.nl/post/39577 for me and does not contain any information that this post is actually on [email protected]. Those post URLs work fine if your home instance is aware about the post, but won't work if nobody has subscribed to that community.
It is; I've seen some Reddit users complain about how the fediverse isn't immediately easy to use and is too complicated and confusing
which is understandable, but also it feels like some of those who are complaining about it (I am stressing right now that I don't mean all of them) straight up don't want to have to learn about it; they want their content immediately and they want it as simple as pushing a button
Learning's good?! Not gonna argue much pro-learning here because I think it's self obvious.
It’s not like they owe us effort to get to know the platform, the platform has to be inviting instead.
An inviting platform can be an invitation to a walled garden where somebody else has control and users are more like "useds" - like reddit. So it can be a trap. Especially if you're the kind of person that has something against learning and doesn't want to bother with any of that, just wants to use.
Reddit is relatively easy to get started, you can just scroll through a bunch of default subs and get going. That’s not easily replicated here.
Let's be honest here, it's very slightly more complex, but I think only the most technically ilitterate can't create an account and join the subs they want. I mean it's in plain English, you can ask for help (and it's already been discussed a lot since the blackout), and it's 99% like reddit when it comes to the concepts and the interface and everything.
I think in the end the most important things will be a good UI, a clean and inviting look, maybe easy-to-understand guides and of course lots of great content. As soon as all of this exists, then the mainstream will have it easier to use Lemmy. An easy, flawless experience goes a long way and taking away any obstacle to get active here will help on the long run.
I'm a new user who's not all that familiar with federated social media. But, I think if this instance looked and acted as much like Reddit as possible, most new users would be barely aware of federation.
I don't think it needs to look like Reddit in particular, but everything needs to be more seamless and intuitive for mainstream users. As long as everything just works so they don't even need to know what it means to be federated then I think it would attract a lot more people.
I like to think myself as a power users and federations have been confusing in Lemmy and Mastodon for sure.
But in Mastodon more confusing than in Lemmy, I think it's because the better interface of Lemmy and the ease to interact and follow other instances.
I just think is a matter of interface and an well-thought integrated migration process so people could move between instances much easier if needed.
It took me a little bit to wrap my head around the concept, but it's fairly straight forward. Part of the problem is that when you want to "join lemmy" you're presented with several dozen instances and it's unclear what you're supposed to do. I went through all of the "general lemmy" instances until I found this one which seems to be the most popular. I get that you can access other instances that are federated but that's not immediately clear to the user.
Right now it will probably be like original Reddit where the user base is mostly tech savvy people.
I remember for years people would look at the interface of Reddit "old reddit" and just not understand it because of its totally utilitarian design. They couldn't make out the subreddit names being r/asentencelikethis. It kept the mainstream users (or let's just say less techsavey) out for a long time.
I think lemmy captures that original feeling of being slightly off-putting unless you're willing to get your head around it.
Is the interface really that terrible? I feel that if it were as easily accessible aa reddit or even facebook then we would be bombarded with so many brain dead posts by users who don't understand how to get through a computer and therefore the quality of posting and discussion goes way down.
I'm probably wrongly stereotyping and judging here but I had to say it.
The structure of the interface isn't bad, but I've encountered a lot of issues stemming from mistakes as novice as ID collisions. It works on phones, but it doesn't look great. At best, it keeps itself simple, which is a positive.
It seems like a win but tech-literate is not equal to smart. Let's say we want advice about cars. Now all the older mechanics who are very smart and technical with cars but not as much with computers won't bring their expertise here. I really want Lemmy to take off. I think it is a good replacement for the scrolling and time-wasting that Reddit provides but I'm worried it will never be a useful resource the same way Reddit is. I think a lot would need to change for that to happen.
I think it can be initially, because it sounds confusing, but I personally feel fairly confident after poking around consistently after a couple of days, that was the amount of time it took for me with reddit all those years ago as well, I believe. Once you figure out how to get to other federations and look up things there, things just run nicely, as long as you're into the old reddit/old internet forums look. Honestly, I found figuring out cross federations in mastodon is way harder, and they're doing it.
But I don't think it will be on the long run to most people once they acclimatise. I'm using both Jerboa and the browser and when I search for new communities to join or look up what's going on on All neither feels like a confusing alien experience. The only part of it that feels weird about it is that after so many years, I very rarely had a need or a desire to use reddit's all, so feels a bit odd.
I've been thinking about setting up my communities based on what I used to follow on Reddit but honestly, I get about 30 seconds to browse at a time and it's too much of a mental hurdle to be like ok...I need to go to what site was it? And I need to keep going back to my Reddit subreddit list, then search for every subreddit on [whatever that site was] then go to the app and paste some URL in... All of this is a pain in the arse on mobile and if it's not the sort of thing I can do in a minute or two then it's not going to get done.
Maybe someone will write a service that lets you enter your Reddit username and it just auto-searches for the closest matching community for each subreddit you are subscribed to and auto-adds them to your Lemmy account
Can't you just log in to your Lemmy instance and search the communities by clicking the communities button? You just need to look at "all" instead of "local" communities.
Maybe? I thought I read that to search for communities across all instances you have to use some external website that indexed them all (can't remember the name)
I already signed into an instance and created a user name and password? Do I need to join a unique instance for every community I join? Does everyone just use password managers or something like that?
As this instance just got defederated from beehaw.org, I would definitely say so since that's a massive pain, creating multiple accounts for one service just because some other members posted spam is really annoying.
Wow, I didn't know defederation was a thing until reading the comments in this post. In that case, I agree with the OP that not leading with federation when promoting Lemmy is probably the best.
Basically, we now have a local, frozen in time copy of the old beehaw communities on this instance, that will not sync with any other instance anymore since the main instance of that community is no longer talking to this instance. You can still make posts and comments on there, but the only people seeing them will be other lemmy.world users.
Just joined, absolutely puzzled about how this thing is structured. I can (just about) see how things are structured, after some stops and starts and also understand why that’s a positive thing now but it’s all backwards for me.
Why should a user need to get to grips with all of that, and flit around wondering which instance might contain content they want when they just want to start reading stuff that interest them?
I’ve joined this instance, who am I missing out on seeing in others? What’s being said in others that I’ll regret missing? Why is it all walled off seemingly necessitating me to register afresh each time I want to check someone where else out?
The content needs to come first, the structure should be presented and needed to be understood secondarily, it’s backwards and it WILL put people off I’m afraid.
You don't need to make an account for other instances.
It's like email, just becuase you may have an email account with Gmail doesn't mean you are prevented from emailing Yahoo accounts.
If you have an account on lemmy.world, you can still read/comment/etc posts on other instances such as lemmy.ml. You may need to change the toggle from "local" to "all", but you should be able to interact with other communities
From a slightly more technical perspective - ActivityPub is the protocol(like how email uses MIME and whatever the RFC is lol). Any activitypub service can hypothically communicate with any other activitypub service.(In practice is another story) This includes lemmy, mastodon, peertube and even facebook's upcoming Thread service.
You don’t need to make an account for other instances.
Until that community you subscribe to on another instance disappears because they defederate from one that your account is on due to that other one not being a safe space.
Hi. New user here! I think the Fediverse is cool but there are definitely some anomalies. I have a lemmy.world account and a kbin.social one too.
I posted on the Steam [email protected] instance using lemmy.world. The thing is, there is one comment that is visible using my kbin.social that is not visable using my lemmy.world account. If I hadn't checked I would not know about this comment. Every other comment works fine, and I have waited about a day to see if it would appear. Don't know if it's a bug, or a feature!
I think it could be, but I explained how it worked to my gf who is not tech-savvy at all and barely got into reddit, and she thought it was a cool idea.
Especially the fact that you can interface with other federated apps (mastadon) inside the same interface.
The biggest hurdle I see is getting good apps (devs are doing great work on this front), and good content (people moving from reddit are going a long way to solving this issue).
Yes, it will absolutely be a barrier to entry to many. Especially people who never used discussion boards. Before reddit, I was an active member on a dozen or so boards, and always wished there was a simpler way for them to interact. So, Lemmy makes sense to me.
If activitypub had existed between forums like phpbb and discourse from the beginning, we might not ever have had reddit. Huge force multiplier. Existing forum software should add support, IMO.
I wish we could just stop making a big deal out of the federation, other than choosing an initial home and having perceived duplicate groups it has more or less no impact to the front end users.
It's a backend thing and we need to bury it more in the UI so people don't feel it.
Exactly. Make it infrastructure that's hidden away from the front end. Find some way to wrap up duplicate groups into larger categories or something, and figure out a way to migrate accounts if your home instance tanks. That would cover all my concerns.
Each community on each instance should have at least one required tag when created. There should be a list of tags available. If you make a meme community, you use the meme tag, and it lumps your community in with every other one that has the meme tag, then you can subscribe to a tag and it shows you all posts from all communities in that tag. There should then be a way to hide posts from certain communities within that tag if they start getting stupid. Not sure how viable this is though.
There's a huge stigma around it. A lot of friction with mastodon. I think they're working toward meta-communities.
I do have worries about people signing up to smaller nodes and losing all their posts/subs/data when a node shuts down. It would be kinda cool if we had the ability to merge nodes or have a true decentralized login.
I'm going to take a risky stance and say getting onboard isn't actually hard. I didn't learn anything or read anything to get in, I just kind of poked a few buttons and wrote two sentences about why I'm joining.
That said, the gumption to A) try anything new and B) write two cogent sentences might just be enough to deter a few people, and that's no bad thing. The site(s) don't need to become profitable, so it's kind of a non-issue who joins or not.
It absolutely will be, at least at first. But as long as Lemmy can keep some forward momentum, the idea will become less and less alien to more mainstream users as more people are exposed to it.
Lemmy doesn’t have to kill Reddit on the spot, it just has to be a viable alternative. And as long as we keep the communities here alive, it will become one. I don’t think the idea of federation will be strange at all in a few years.
Two things matter: (1) Content (2) Accessibility to the content.
For (1), we need more active participations and generate more content.
For (2), the mechansim of remote community discovery and subscription are still very tedious and error prone. Not only the remote community is not visible to the instance (Yes I know it's lazy fetching but it still does not work somehow for some remote community subscriptions), but also the lack of integration of community browser are still hard for general users.
In the last few days I have spent countless hours to try community subscriptions on a number of instances.
IMO, everybody tries to explain what fediverse is, instances are, how they work, so on, and so forth. That's what is pushing people away. Just point them to one place. Lemmy.world seems to have the least friction to signup (no approval, only email confirmation), while also hosting a lot of communities. Just tell people to signup on lemmy.world, and search for whatever communities they want to join, and subscribe to the one with most subscribers. That should be enough. No need to 'educate' them on how fediverse works.
If lemmy every becomes mainstream the implementation details will be completely lost to people, and that's ok. You can try explaining someone what a web browser is, but people will still say "I opened google" or even "I opened internet" instead of "I opened chrome". With lemmy there will probably be a few huge instances that people just gravitate to, and if/when something goes wrong, communities will have to migrate, and users will have to try to get into a new instance.
That's what happened with email. Back in the day it was basically just institutions and very geeky people with basement servers who had an email address (and before that, government). For it to hit mainstream, large, for-profit corporations, had to set up mail servers and make it easy to get in and use it. Nowadays people just use their browser or outlook or Gmail app without even knowing what an SMTP server is. If the fediverse evolved that way, I hope by then there are a lot of communities that have taken root in community-owned instances, otherwise power just gets reconcentrated to a few big players again.
That makes sense. I guess there's no one stopping someone from creating an instance which has ads and tries to do a for-profit version right? The only thing that might happen is all the other instances un-federating it.
Not once there's a more feature rich app. Seriously, that's all it will take. My wife is as "mainstream" as it gets, and her only objections to, trying lemmy as a whole is that the ux sucks in browsers and the only two apps that are really available lack features that should be there (like the links on jerboa not going to the right place), and little things like being able to organize subscriptions or do an in-app "multi".
My sister said pretty much the same thing. Out of my main group of friends, none are exactly "into" things like this, and only one said he'd never bother with it at all (and he hated reddit long before anyway). These are fairly casual users of social media of any kind, they aren't power users, they're the average joe. I was able to explain to them exactly how to use lemmy in less than five minutes.
The only other objection that wasn't more of an app thing is the signup delay. That's a bigger barrier to entry than anything else, and it isn't something a friendly user can help with, unlike finding new communities or how to navigate.
Yea I think these are all fair points. And I guess when I say mainstream I don't mean individuals that churn out low effort farming posts, but rather people who contribute legitimate content/discussion but are pretty ignorant when it comes to internet/tech.
The other thing is--with various forums dedicated to the same content, i.e. technology hosted at beehaw/lemmy.ml/lemmy.world+ it seems like that could potentially hinder growth? Or that it seems superfluous to have multiple forums accessible from one platform dedicated to the same thing but with varying content
I think, given time, a lot of duplicate forums will be consolidated over time, as people start picking favourites. In the case of smaller communities, I expect federation will be of great benefit, as a community could pick one instance and just sit there, without worry that it'll be duplicated somewhere else and split the community.
Just a guess as an informed observer, of course. We'll have to see whether I'm actually right.
Yeah, for sure. I'm not sure I really mind that, though. It's also not super crazy to get a basic handle on, so if it becomes popular enough, more people will be willing to try to figure it out. I also imagine that the developers working on it will try to find more intuitive ways for users to get started.
I don't really care too much about the mainstream coming here, though. Part of the appeal of the Fediverse, I feel, is that it's got that kind of "underground" vibe to it. We are out of the mainstream, but there are still people around, discussion is happening, content is being created. It has a fresh and unique feel to it.
I've only just joined and that's because the past few times when I went to join I was confused about joining a certain server. I figured I'd have to investigate which server is best before I joined one and found it was the wrong one.
Now I'm realising it doesn't matter too much. However the toggle at the top of the main page between 'subscribed', 'local' and 'all' took me some time to realise. That was only when I'd subscribed to groups and they weren't appearing on the main page. So wondering how I get to see them was already a point of annoyance.
Having that automatically toggle to 'subscribed' once you've started down that path would have helped.
Anyway, Once you're past choosing a server it all feels strangely familiar and I'm liking it a lot.
I only joined yesterday or the day before but I have to admit, I'm not loving this place so far. Adding communities that are not part of this instance is a giant PITA. The whole instance getting federated or defederated seemingly at the whim of the instance host is a bit sus to me too. Also, for some reason when I'm typing it just keeps having a popup saying "report created" in the bottom left. This place also is just as much of an echo chamber as Reddit from what I have seen, which is by far my biggest gripe with Reddit.
From what I can tell, all of humanity is an echo chamber. In every single space we build, every relationship we form, and every conversation ever had, people will try to team up with people that agree with them and stand against people that disagree with them. Lemmy has ended up doing that because all space built by humans will end up doing that, it is inevitable to a large extent.
For the not so technically inclined the most confusing part of any fediverse service probably is the idea of "signup in some instance" and then you can interact with peope/posts in other intances too. The lazy mainstream people want a single place to signup and stay like reddit, facebook, twitter etc.
I think it will ... if I look at my own use-cases for sites like this, it's connecting with people over shared interests (rather than instances) or scrolling memes. I don't see how any of these use cases benefit from federation (from the user perspective). The looming threat of information disappearing due to defederation, the confusion about instances, etc ... that's off-putting even to tech-savvy users.
Also ultimately I find it questionable from a philosophical perspective. Why should it matter which instance is your "home" instance, unless that's specifically the way of interaction you're looking for?
Again, for me it's interests over instances, and I think the federation aspect is just an additional layer that doesn't add any value.
I only joined yesterday or the day before but I have to admit, I'm not loving this place so far. Adding communities that are not part of this instance is a giant PITA. The whole instance getting federated or defederated seemingly at the whim of the instance host is a bit sus to me too. Also, for some reason when I'm typing it just keeps having a popup saying "report created" in the bottom left. This place also is just as much of an echo chamber as Reddit from what I have seen, which is by far my biggest gripe with Reddit.
It actually sounds like you would've been way more satisfied if you joined some instance like beehaw.org that have a more sanitized approach to all this. But then again you said you don't want defederation. Seems like you want to eat the cake, but also have it.
Is Beehaw less of an echo chamber? Reading their sidebar it seems like it would be even more of one. I'm curious as to why you think I might be happier there. Is it easier to navigate somehow?
and sure it may be confusing but federation is the entire point - otherwise we're just creating another reddit / twitter / etc thats doomed to follow the same fate