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!
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.
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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.
One login for the entire fediverse would make sense.
kinddda. you’d still need to do something smart because it needs to be decentralized. IRC handled it with registered nicknames, i’d think we could field something with some form of federated authentication provider, split the data between a few nodes.
Agreed! Then it could be really like email! You create an account on an “account server”, we’ll call it, and then you can use that account to log into “community servers”. Instances wouldn’t need to federate content with each other, since users could just go to other instances with their account.
If you didn’t federate the account servers, noone would want to step and and pay for the service for everyone. The accounts need to be spread as much as the data to protect them, but they need to be redundant as well
Of course, the account servers should be federated, but the content servers don’t need to be.
I’m not really up on the intricacies of the federation philosophy, but why isn’t it just distributed p2p style?
So there would be 1 forward facing thing that you interact with, but all of the backend functions would be spread across all the volunteer servers/instances. Like torrent seeding.
Maybe that’s not even feasible, but I’ve been wondering since I joined.
I read this message this morning, and pondered this for quite some time. It’s definitely not impossible, but there’s a college thesis worth of conidiations and difficult problems to address. There’s probably already a number of products that would be a better fit than federation.
The torrent system as it is, is ill fit, it’s got the distribute things and protect them with hashes in spades, but unlike forums it doesn’t need to deliver you data in a timely fashion. If that copy of Scooby Do and the Reluctant Werewolf takes a couple of days for someone to come online and have you a few k of content, it’s no big deal. That said, it IS possible to watch really popular videos over BT.
I think the deepest problem is trying to keep the data online. You obvious can’t have a multi-terabyte copy of forums on everyone’s box, people are going to need to split and choose who gets what but they you have to figure out a way to keep everything everywhere online. You can’t just force people to host everything or you’ll end up with unexpected jailbait hosting.
You’d have to sit down for a long time and draw up a spec to even define what your problems are, you’d have to figure out things like, how much of the data do you expect to be available all the time, how many copies do you seed around, how you’d manage to keep people seeding it.
Policing and moderation also becomes a sore subject. Most of the P2P stuff is resilient against removing items by deisgn, it’s immutable once launched. For things like edits, you could do versioning systems, but like if someone was doxxed or someone posted nudes of their ex, there’s no way to remove the old versions.
Authentication and identification would be a nightmare. you’d probably need to digitally sign everything and keep your keys in a chain of custody, signing each new key with the old one.
it’s an awesome thought exercise though.
Wow, thanks for such a detailed reply. I was sitting here thinking something like “just take what the server does and uh… distribute it”, but it’s clearly not trivial.
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.