Now that reddit started dying, people are exploring the fediverse. I’m one of these people and I found lots of inconveniences, which I want to share with you. Lets get a conversation going.
There are tons of instances which “communicate” with each other, but in reality they are pretty much separated. I tried to connect to some Lemmy instances from Mastodon but it repeatedly gave me “not found” results (even though Lemmy itself said I should try that, see pictures).
-What happens if a server goes down or a server keeper decides they want to modify some post or comment? It doesn’t seem much different from what spez did, except now you put everything in the hand of another random person. Legal issues are potentially even worse in this case because there is no company behind the site to blame for their wrongdoings.
-You have to create tens of accounts if you want to post on other instances. Yeah, you might be able to subscribe to communities from one instance but you can’t post there, only on your own. Maybe I’m missing something here but it doesn’t seem like you can post to the communities of other instances.
-Alternatively: create the same community in your instance? That would just make useless duplications or even separate instances even more…
There are lots of other issues with the fediverse, these are just from the top of my mind. Feel free to share your thoughts, annoyances, or even clarifications.
I’m no expert, but I do believe the idea is that these things will have to sort themselves out based on community trust.
If a server goes down… Your account goes down. Migrate to another one, hopefully exporting your settings. There’s no total profile karma so that shouldn’t matter.
If a community/server is horrible, the main servers might blacklist it. If a server owner edits people’s comments, people will likely notice and warn others to move away from that server.
In that regard, it’s not different than trusting any other internet forum - some quite big ones had quite particular admins that would do everything from leaking personal info to editing posts. At the same time, the ones with trusted management and good communities are more likely to grow and create positive relationships with other servers. The appearance of better Lemmy apps could also help with filtering.