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.
Point 1 is part of why I’m gonna start self-hosting a Lemmy instance at some point. If I host my own instance then I can back up my data and ensure it’s never lost.
The Fediverse in general needs federated identities, preferrably self-sovereign. Something like nostr, with validation signatures. E.g., you own your ID, and validate it with some mechanism of your preference. If midwest.social trusts your validator, it creates a space for your ID.
I don’t think this is conceptually or implementationally difficult, but it would require a well written standard and consider both privacy issues (for users) and protections against spammers and bad actors (for hosting providers). I don’t thing PGP’s web-of-trust model would be a bad one. I think using the nostr network (quasi online chain) would be a great idea, and all of the parts are there; it would need a decent UI and support in each Fedi server implementation - which would be the biggest hurdle.
This would address the DID issue, and I agree with you that this is issue #1. Right now, users don’t own their identities: their hosting service does. If midwest.social chose to, they could nuke my account and the canonical source of truth for all my posts. I run my own ActivityPub server and so own the account I use for Mastodon; and, perhaps, someday Fediverse federation will evolve to the point where I can use that account for everything. But it’s an expensive node for me to operate, and not everyone can run their own server. Better, self-sovereign, and truly federated DIDs is incredibly important.
Lemmy needs two things to be successful:
- users
- users
and it’s already getting more and more of each of those.
It won’t get more users if it continues to be difficult to use.
I mean …
That’s active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.
So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.
One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don’t think it’s right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren’t.
Twelve of those are mine, due partly to the very shortcomings being discussed here.
The reality is that reddit still exists, and is still more user-friendly (and that’s a low bar). It’s great that lemmy is getting this bump, but it won’t last unless we make it easy to switch for most people. If lemmy was good enough to be a reddit alternative already, it would be. But it’s not, and the only reason people are here is because of the protest.
people kept saying similar stuff about Mastodon, and yet, miraculously, its user base somehow keeps growing.
- Create account
- interact with community
- ???
- Profit
Terribly difficult
Thank you for that insightful comment. You’ve really addressed my point in its entirety, and thoroughly proven me to be a dullard. I submit to your vast intelligence.
These are good points. It sucks that as a PhD student in CS, I still don’t understand the workings of federation and other important Internet concepts. I hope someone smarter will work on this stuff, though.
You don’t need an upfront detailed understanding of everything to get started. Contributing to projects like this is a research project like any other.
That’s fair. I think I should invest my time in contributing to third-party apps, though. That’s a barrier to entry for newbies, I think, who want to be able to tap an app on their phone instead of going to a website. I believe Memmy uses Expo, which I might be able to contribute to.
Counter strike?
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.
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.
I think number 1 is important so it’s easier to move. Otherwise we could feel centralized to one instance rather than feeling free to federate
I like the idea of aggregating communities. Especially if the modding tools are powerful enough. This could lead to communities being essentially curated lists of other communities. Which is great for new users to discover new communities without being overwhelmed by the unordered list of communities on the instance.
Another feature that I’d like to see is an equivalent to the mastodon’s lists, a way to aggregate communities for yourself. So that you could browse the content of communities sharing a same theme in a dedicated view.
Thank you for finding and writing the words for it.
Both points describe very well what I miss at least in Lemmy like Fediverse platforms.
You can create a one-person instance and hold your identity there.
If you what you want is for every server to hold your identity, you have to trust all servers. I think that an evil admin would be able to impersonate any user from any instance if that were the case. How do you delete your account? Can an any admin delete your account everywhere? Which one is the real “you”?
I would assume the same way any other system with untrusted nodes works: with the client authenticating by use of a cryptographic signature on everything they submit.
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).
100% agreed with both. Especially DIDs just need to happen on all ActivityPub platforms. It will not only free users from being locked to an instance, but it will also allow instances to be much more flexible in scaling their capacity. Lemmy.ml is overloaded because they have too many users, and anyone who signed up there can no longer use their account. DID would allow them to immediately use their account from any small or large instance with spare capacity without changing the experience. The same would go for Mastodon.
It sounds like a moderation nightmare having people come over to your instance with a whole lot of content they’ve created that are now being hosted by your servers. You’ve got to look through the whole thing to make sure it is not breaking TOS of your instance. Doesn’t sound great to me.
The most straightforward way of resolving #1 (for those so inclined to resolve it) is to host your own instance. Your “identity” becomes the right-side of the @ rather than the left.
Personally I don’t know if Lemmy needs these to be successful. Depending on your viewpoint, Lemmy already is successful. Lemmy instances existed long before the current Reddit influx and seemed to be doing okay even if things were a bit slow.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site with the great benefit of federation allowing direct access and communication to other sites running in the fediverse. Identities and communities are specific to an instance because that instance is an independent community. In that frame of mind, having a different account on different instances and overlapping community topics between instances makes sense. Same way multiple forums have boards about the same topic and joining multiple forums meant multiple accounts. Federation just makes it easier to see across that gap.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site
I think you are right, and I think a major contributor to this is how Lemmy is communicated. We are inviting people to a concept when they expect to be invited to a place.
“Join Lemmy!” indicates Lemmy is the site. A site. One coherent system. Then “and pick a federated server” just seems like random frustration.
“Join <the instance I am using>! It’s on Lemmy so you can easily contribute to the communities on Beehaw, lemmy.ml, toupoli, … without creating separate accounts there.” is how I think we should go about it.
That sounds highly inconvenient from a end user experience if I’m honest. As a predominantly mobile user having to have multiple accounts set up in app and remembering to change to the right one for each instance will get old quickly.
I think there’s a third big thing: really good UX. I don’t have an Android phone, so I don’t know about Jerboa, but the web interface … could use some work. I know the bug with new posts pushing the feed down is on track to be fixed soon, but wow, it can be really quite bad. iOS apps are getting way better quickly, too, but overall they’re nascent.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but additionally, I think the ranking algorithm(s) could use some work. I can see there’s tons of content, if I sort by new, but sorting by active results in stale posts, and sorting by hot doesn’t seem to quite hit the sweet spot on tenured/good quality content vs. newness. The recent ranking bug(s) haven’t helped matters there either.
but sorting by active results in stale
yep, the default sorting makes it looks like nothing has been posted for 3 days
I think these are “nice to have” features rather than absolutely essential, but:
For 1. I could deal with just being able to download my list of subscriptions and upload it to another server. That’s the only bit that’s really slow to copy over by hand.
For 2. I think the main thing that really would benefit is the ability to search all active communities on all servers. The way it is now is alright if there are only half a dozen really active instances whose communities I might be interested in, but it doesn’t scale if there are hundreds of servers to check out. Probably the more important of the two IMHO in the long run.
Being able to download your own data would be a start
Yeah, search all federated communities.
It would not be hard to get a list of all communities on each federated instance. Update it a few times a day, even once a day.
But this is the hardest thing for me, searching is a challenge
