For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?
netsplits/defederation.
You can’t just tell someone to register for any server, and they will be able to see everything. So they then have to choose a server, which takes effort, and can cause analysis paralysis.
Maybe that is exactly what we need to do, to spare them from the indecision. Recommend them to a specific instance to sign up and follow you (if in doubt, the instance we use). I suppose we can mention there are lots of choices, and those who are inclined that way will want to explore other servers, many are not, and for them pointing them at a server may be best.
I’m just thinking that trying to say there are lots of networks, each with lots of servers etc, may be the problem.
Alternatively, should ask them some questions like do they want to post short format or long text format, and take into account a specific interest they have, and then we still recommend a server instance to them to join.
So for fellow ham radio operators, I just pointed them all to the ham radio Mastodon instance and said sign up there.
We can compose a list of instances with sane blocklists for each software and audit from time to time.
Yeah, but then the blocklists themselves become a centralized feature. I’m not saying “don’t block the fascists”, just that it’s going to be hard to maintain a blocklist.
I can totally see the Fediverse going the way of email, as in you need a reasonably large amount of capital to maintain a well-respected, not defederated-from server.
By ‘sane blocklists’ I meant small and auditable blocklists actually. There are instances like programming.dev, lemmy on sdf and the instance I’m on that don’t preemptively defederate from other instances. That’s what I meant.
I mean that Lemmy and the Fediverse is not big enough for Russian troll farms and US ad agencies to start up massive numbers of instances and drown us in bullshit, like with email. If it goes that way, blocklists will sadly not be enough.
I’m not sure how this hypothetical issue that may happen in a far future relates to what issue I addressed in my comment, actually.
Could be interesting
https://fediseer.com/ can be used for something like that.
The ability to “float” between servers would go a long way to improve this. Make an account on one server, then come across another that you vibe with more, and single button press and you’ve transferred. All you subs, comment history etc are preserved (for overlapping federated servers). No idea how to implement this, but it feel achievable, perhaps with a quick step to set up a new password and username if it was taken.