Hello all! I’m one of the original reddit users, and before that a long time Digg user. I want to enjoy and participate in the fediverse.
Can someone please explain federation, and to what degree the content from other platforms / instances will appear for a user who only visits kbin.social? I understand that federation is currently broken. What happens when it gets fixed?
I tried searching, but no luck. If there’s a fan or link, all the better :D
Best analogy I’ve heard is to think about email. I’m using gmail, maybe someone else uses yahoo, and maybe a third person has their own mail server set up at home. We can all send each other emails, and the content of the emails will largely look the same, despite that none of us are accessing it through the same site.
Another example; since you’re over on kbin; I’m on Lemmy.world right now. I can still see your posts and comments and you can still see mine as though we’re both browsing the same website.
Why is that important? Basically it keeps any one person like Spez from having complete and total control over the entire “site”. Since the “website” is actually a lot of websites made to act like one big one; each individual site has its own server, admins, etc. and if one goes down, or has admins that go on a power trip; it won’t totally ruin the experience for everyone on the fediverse; just that one server.
All that is to say, it sounds complicated, but none of that stuff really matters unless you care about the tech behind it. For the end user like you and me, you just gotta pick a site and make an account, and it works pretty seamlessly. At least it should, the devs are seeing some growing pains right now as registrations ramp up and cause things to break. But hopefully that stuff will get worked out with a little time.
All of this seems unnecessarily confusing, and massively confusing at that. Why would anyone want to join a different instance? If I comment on one instance, then can I log into a different instance with the same credentials and edit my comment? Why would I want to do that? If I moderate a sub on one instance, then am I still a moderator of that same sub on every other instance? Why don’t we all just use one instance? The entire design of this system seems intended to confuse people.
There’s a certain syndrome — I bet it has a name, but I’ve never heard it named — where extremely smart people find it easy to grasp complicated ideas, yet fail to understand that those ideas which they grasp are far too complicated for normal people.
Personally, I know how distributed systems work, and if that’s how you want to design your backend for resilience, cool. But such complexity should never be exposed to users. And as a user, I’m here just to finally escape reddit’s governance. I want a dead-simple UX, because that’s what will attract people to use this platform. Move to a .com, as no other TLD sounds valid. Combine “threads” with “microblogs” and combine “upvotes” with “boosts”. Dramatically simplify the UI. There should not be two different “Settings”.
It seems clear that kbin is currently the defacto reddit replacement, but I don’t think it’ll succeed well until it drops this federation complexity, and focuses on building a simple, scalable website.
The ability to federate is really just a bonus, it doesn’t prevent making the core website good. Users don’t need to learn anything about Federation to use the site, either.
Keep in mind that the entire Fediverse is still massively smaller than Reddit; content sharing between instances is a really useful and important way to have enough content for users to view and participate in.
I don’t know if your questions are rhetoric or not, but accounts on different instances/platforms are not linked in any way. These instances and platforms are all different social media outlets, they just happen to “talk the same language”, called ActivityPub, and are willing to talk to each other. That’s it really, and if you want a more complete picture I can highly recommend the wiki article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse.
