Mastodawn

Could federation be a turn-off for more 'mainstream' users?

https://lemmy.world/post/119851

Could federation be a turn-off for more 'mainstream' users? - Lemmy.world

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!

drubbis Jun 14, 2023

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

Dalek Thal Jun 14, 2023

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.

TheBeege Jun 14, 2023

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

bdonvr Jun 14, 2023

And I'm pretty sure they're working to make the default web version of Lemmy work more seamlessly.

Skelectus Jun 14, 2023

Very much this. A normal user doesn't care about federation and much less wants to spend extra effort to get around it.

Dojan Jun 14, 2023

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.

Merthin1234 Jun 14, 2023

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.

Thiago Jedi Jun 14, 2023

I agree with you.

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".

popcornheadlines Jun 14, 2023

I like the suggestion idea, except it should not just be one instance. I think it would be a great idea to show the top 2 or 3 so that one just doesn't completely dominate

Glunkbor Jun 14, 2023

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.

nepatriots32 Jun 14, 2023

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 creating. It has a fresh and unique feel to it.

knyuen Jun 14, 2023

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.

Pekka Jun 14, 2023

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.

Stoneykins Jun 14, 2023

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.

Pekka Jun 14, 2023

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.

Skelectus Jun 14, 2023

Why a browser addon? My first approach would be to have the client do the job. Link to the page via the current instance, and ask the server to fetch it if it doesn't exist.

Pekka Jun 14, 2023

This is about a user browsing on another Lemmy instance. For example, a user from lemmy.world receives a link on a chat app to a post on beehaw.org. Now he wants to reply to that post, to do so the user has to go to the same post on their home instance. Beehaw.org has no idea that the user has an account on lemmy.world, so they can't just redirect the user. It is very difficult for Lemmy instances to share this data, as browsers have built in protections to prevent websites from sharing common identifiers (those were used to track people over multiple websites).

A menu could be added where the user can select their instance, but that would still require Beehaw.org to know about the existence of the user's home instance. This could still give issues with smaller instances, that are not well federated with other instances.

Skelectus Jun 14, 2023

Oh, I see. I was thinking of opening links within Lemmy.

Aninjanameddaryll Jun 14, 2023

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.

Anders Rytter Hansen Jun 14, 2023

@drubbis Doesn't make sense in my opinion. If you turn off federation it's basically just another Reddit

charles Jun 14, 2023

But then your decision of "which server" is even more important

Anders Rytter Hansen Jun 14, 2023

@charles
You mean if it's turned off or kept on?

femboy_link.mp4 Jun 14, 2023

It absolutely will, at least at first. But as long as Lemmy can keep some forward momentum, the idea will get less and less alien to more mainstream users. Reddit was confusing for mainstream users for a long time but they got used to it eventually.

Ryumast3r Jun 14, 2023

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).

GiantBasil Jun 14, 2023

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.

ZappySnap Jun 14, 2023

It will absolutely.

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).

francisfordpoopola Jun 14, 2023

See Bitcoin. And Mastadon. UX dev's tend to not be front in line when developing the next random technology alternative.

Ataraxia Jun 15, 2023

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!

NevermindNoMind Jun 14, 2023

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.

c2h6 Jun 15, 2023

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.

isdfoa Jun 15, 2023

My dumbass thought 'local' meant popular in my geo location and 'all' is worldwide when I first joined 😅

c2h6 Jun 15, 2023

Not dumb! We're all new to this!

nonresonant Jun 15, 2023

Same here but I was confused because I didn't give any location permissions, lt.

jugalator Jun 16, 2023

Yeah I think during design, they sometimes forget and use terminology that makes sense out of a federation perspective rather than newcomers. "Local" could as well have been named "This Server" and it would be much more clear.

AFK BRB Chocolate Jun 15, 2023

Funny that you mention two very popular instances, one of which is now defederated from the other, so content between them isn't shared. I agree with OP that a lot of people are just going to throw up their hands if they hit something like that early on.

I'm generally getting the hang of it, and get why we have situations like this defederation thing happening, but I've also been a software engineer for close to 40 years. I made a personal decision not to recommend it to some of my family members because I don't think it's ready for them. I think an app that automated things like subscribing to communities on other instances would go a long way.

ZappySnap Jun 15, 2023

What do you mean one is defederated from the other? I'm on lemmy.world and can see all beehaw communities just fine.

falconfetus8 Jun 16, 2023

You're seeing older posts from before it was defederated.

ZappySnap Jun 15, 2023

What do you mean one is defederated from the other. I'm on lemmy.world and can see communities from beehaw just fine.

slaacaa Jun 15, 2023

Yes, just send them to e.g. lemmy.world, they don’t care about the details, nor do they need to.

heili Jun 15, 2023

undefined> 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/ 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.

taakofromtv Jun 16, 2023

I was mad confused by "servers" in Minecraft, but my kids got it at 6 years old. We'll figure this out, too.

Cool Beance Jun 15, 2023

You just described my entire journey for my first two days on Lemmy

Rick Jun 15, 2023

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.

root Jun 15, 2023

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

Turtle Jun 16, 2023

concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS

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.

DigiWolf Jun 14, 2023

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.

BigPapaE Jun 14, 2023

Yeah I can kind of see a Basic vs. Advanced sign-up where the basic flow just auto-suggests a server

cascadingsymmetry Jun 14, 2023

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.

c2h6 Jun 16, 2023

I generally tell people not to over think it.

Step 1 is to join one of the big instances.

Once they're in, then talk about browsing cross instances.

If they stay long enough, they'll figure out favorite instances.

Raf Jun 14, 2023

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.

Mithre Jun 14, 2023

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.

fredthefish Jun 14, 2023

That makes sense, and if you're talking about being purely read only, it can all be cached relatively cheaply

bdiddy Jun 14, 2023

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.

Incinerate Jun 14, 2023

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.

ffejhog Jun 14, 2023

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 is). 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.

ActivityPub - Wikipedia

heili Jun 15, 2023

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.

Hyperslob Jun 16, 2023

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!

Really enjoying the experience overall.

fredthefish Jun 14, 2023

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.

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

HorseFD Jun 15, 2023

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.

AncientKev Jun 15, 2023

As a new user, what does this mean?

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?