I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I’d like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:
-
I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
-
The content and style of each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances with lengthy domains.
-
Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.
These reasons prompted me to explore more decentralized networks, I mean truly decentralized networks, such as Nostr.
However, creating a Nostr account and saving the Recovery Phrases is challenging (I lost my first Nostr account due to the loss of Recovery Phrases). And generally speaking, the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.
I believe people should leave Twitter due to shadowbans and robots and Facebook due to privacy concerns, but I’m struggling to choose a platform to migrate to. Each has its drawbacks, making it difficult to decide.
I’d love to hear your opinions on this.
the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.
It will be like that in all places that have no effective moderation (i.e. “server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please”).
I came here to find this comment. Moderation and censorship are so profoundly confused with each other so often. And without any moderation, bots and scam will take over every kind of content eventually.
Like the Internet ten years ago???
You realize that ten years ago was 2013, not 2001 or something? The Internet was not quiet in 2013, in fact I found it a lot more engaging then.
Kind of agree actually. It hadn’t fully turned to shit yet but it was going on that direction. Now today, it’s like cable TV.
I don’t know, I don’t feel that I have updates I need to get… I just scroll Lemmy and discuss things for a while, then do other things. I’m happy it doesn’t have tons of activity because social media is not supposed to take over our lives.
I see people on the bus sitting on tiktok and I feel sorry for them.
And as for switching instances, you are doing it wrong. You can subscribe to any community in the fediverse right from your instance.
I agree, when I first came over from Reddit I was a bit disappointed because I could get through this feed so quickly. However, tallying up how many hours I spend here. It’s still two or three a day which is honestly too much. So I think now I can say if I can still feel like I spend too much time here but also get more hours back in my life. I’d say I won
Indeed. This is the way out of big tech algorithmic hell and into actual social media.
Exactly. The initial bite of “oh that’s it” is really the addiction to Reddit I had that I needed to be weined off of. Really Lemmy is still a ton of content, especially once you get subbed everywhere. We just don’t have that corpo added addictive element of “You need to be here or you’ll miss something”
quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
That’s what I’m looking for.
Same. “Today’s” internet sucks so bad it makes me want to get lost in the woods.
Your brain is healing, give it some time.
been on lemmy.world, accessing via voyager on ios. its basically identical to reddit from an end-user perspective. sure its janky sometimes and content doesn’t get refreshed as frequently as a website that has millions of daily active users but the content is generally more enjoyable and im getting just as much of a dopamine hit of infinite scrolling as i was back in the day, with significantly less annoyance on top.
I made accounts all over the place and settled on kbin. It federates with Mastodon as well as lemmy, you can follow hashtags and block instances or websites yourself, and I just find the interface way more intuitive.
I’ve been here for a few months and my feed is finally at the point where my needs are being met and I never run out of internet.
I was rooting for Kbin but their lack of official API at the beginning gave them a very late start. And now Artemis App is stale development when it was so promising. At this point I’ve worked on my Lemmy account and plan on staying here on the long run. Hoping some QOL updates come to Lemmy and the apps (community grouping, better hot algorithm…) to make it a perfect platform. In the end it all depends on critical mass of users. The more users on a platform the better it will be. It’s still light on niche communities and themed communities feel spread thin across instances (where groups would really help) and big communities like Technology news and meme group overpower the small ones on the home page.
better hot algorithm
Next lemmy version adds a “scaled” sort which will factor in the size of communities so less active ones get exposure too.
That’s awesome news!
@LazaroFilm I know what you mean about overpowering. I actually block all the big meme communities. That way, viewing all and sorting by new is still inreresting and helps me discover communities.
- like the Internet ten years ago
I would like that. I liked the internet ten years ago. I think today it’s filled with yet more noise and lots of low-effort posts. But I don’t know where Lemmy is headed. In August/September I was pretty active here and had lots of nice conversations and in the last few weeks I struggled a bit getting meaningful discussions going. And there seem to be a lot of posts where OP doesn’t engage and just dumps a question. And people only reply to comments in order to point out mistakes.
I don’t know your exactly problem. Maybe you’re using Lemmy/Mastodon wrong?! If you mean there’s not enough activity in niche interest communities, I agree…
- each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances
I really like diversity, that’s great. But why do you have to switch instances? The fediverse is supposed to be a connected network of instances. You should be able to do everything from everywhere, subscribe across instances and not needing to switch.
- Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners
I think you confuse decentralized with anonymous / free speech / unmoderated platforms. Federated means it consists of several independent servers that get interconnected. Each server has it’s own autonomy, rules and people who make decisions. (Distributed is yet another term for something slightly different.) If you mean something where nothing gets moderated and no-one banned, I suppose there are platforms like it. But I haven’t yet seen an unmoderated place I like. They are fun for trolls and shitposters for like 3 days, then they become a place for hate and scams, ads and crypto schemes. Mostly posted by bots. And everyone normal will leave the platform so it’s just toxic people mixed with lots of bots. You can post something but the only thing you get as a response is someone writing 25-times the n-word and some crypto-scam bots posting unrelated ads. So here, the will of server owners and moderators is what keeps this place running. Of course they don’t always do the right thing. But still, we need them unless you have something different in mind. Maybe a better way to distribute power?
I think there’s an issue with coupling on the fediverse. For instance, if I run a community, but I’m not happy with the current instance policies, I can’t easily move it to a new insurance (while keeping the memberships). It’s also tricky to migrate my account - and it will lose me posting and vote history, edit/delete rights, etc. Finally, if I want to participate in two servers that have defederated each other, I have to maintain two accounts, which is a terrible user experience.
True. That are some Lemmy specifics and I’d like Lemmy to improve. But Lemmy has so many other issues. Moderation tools, UI bugs, missing error messages, you often can’t write ampersands because the markdown interpreter is a bit stupid, you can’t mute instances… There are currently some 500 issues open for the frontend and 200 more for the backend. There are lots of things to do.
I think moving communities is a bit low priority. Yes, it would be an awesome feature, but rarely needed. Migrating accounts is something I’d definitely like to see implemented. Other federated platforms have this or at least a way to export your account and import it somewhere else. With varying degrees of how well subscriptions are migrated in the process.
The defederation is another issue specific to Lemmy. In my eyes, Lemmy wasn’t quite ready for the inrush of people once the Reddit API thing happened. Some moderation features are still missing to this day. People created communities everywhere without intending to use them but just to claim the name and have moderator rights. Admins did some rushed decisions and were a bit trigger-happy with the ‘defederation’-button. Security issues surfaced. And the lack of a feature that allows users to block instances or defend themselves against things like brigading, makes it necessary for the admins to step in. And the way Lemmy works, defederation is unnecessarily complicated and has lots of unwanted side-effects like posts and comments being visible to some people but not for others, depending on the triangle of your instance, the instance of the other user and the instance that is home to that community.
Pick one you do like and just use that. I originally overthought the Fediverse and made accounts everywhere and thought I wanted all the things. Turns out it’s perfectly fine to just use one and get content federated over from the others.
Also, most phone apps allow you to store credentials for multiple instances and quickly switch between them which is really handy.
I didn’t know about Nostr, and honestly, thank you for letting me know. I find the idea behind the protocol to be pretty interesting, but wouldn’t use it myself. I’m not keen on the idea of removing moderation altogether.
However, I do think that it’s about time we rethink how moderation works on the Internet, and the fediverse should be a good place to start doing so. Perhaps my biggest gripe with the fediverse is that moderation works exactly the same as in corporate social media. Right now, moderators are picked under discretion of whatever the criteria of the admin are, and they are not subject to “the will of the people” so to speak. If a mod or admin acts in bad faith, the only recourse for the rest of the users is to leave, and maybe setup your own instance if you have the technical know-how. And while corporate media admins are somewhat constrained by investors, fediverse admins don’t have to respond to anyone. Which is better than being bound by investors, but here, admins can and do take harsh decisions on a whim without having to justify anything to anyone. Which is honestly not a good thing.
So, while I imagined the fediverse as some network of interconnected small, self-managed communes, what we actually have is a network of petty fiefdoms, some of which do listen to their users even though they are under no obligation to do so, and others outright don’t. I don’t mean to say that centralized services are better at this, but in the end I’m having some of the same problems regarding arbitrariness of moderation and admin decisions here that I had on Reddit and Twitter.
I see the fediverse as the future of social media, but not in its current form. The way it currently works keeps us bound to drama and petty feuds between admins of instances, and that is unavoidable while large fedi platforms are hosted by single people or very small groups of people. Perhaps the way that this could be avoided would be by using a protocol that enforces decentralization of hosting, like Nostr does. I imagine it would work sort of like a torrent, where we are all sharing and hosting the instance or the communities we use, whether completely or only partially. Or perhaps an instance is made out of multiple relays which are hosted separately. This way, we wouldn’t have issues such as admins unilaterally defederating instances because of a disagreement or stuff like that, since we’d all be admins in a way.
I wouldn’t want to do away with moderation, but decisions such as who gets to be moderator, who gets to keep being moderator, and who we ban, fed with or defed from, is consulted via democratic process enforced by design. Otherwise, it’s not going to be meaningfully different from centralized media once the big instances become big enough.
I think moderation can be solved by giving communities more freedom to merge or move instances. The “market” will correct overreaches in moderation on a free platform such as the fediverse. If the moderators on one community are overzealous or poorly moderate their community, then users will move to the same community on another instance. If instance admins are the same, the community can move to another instance.
Being able to migrate your community to a new instance without losing old content or subscribers would really help moderation stay in check.
Give yourself time. Anything less than 3 months to get used to a platform is unrealistic. Humans don’t like change, if after 3 months you still have issues, then fair shout
Everything has positives and negatives. It’s up to you to evalute what you want and what you’re willing to put up with.
On one end, traditional social media is totally centralized, controlled solely by the corpo. On the opposite, you have total decentralization like P2P networks for torrenting.
You pointed out the problems on one end, very little regulation of spam, scams, total decentralization is often very much isolationist.
To me, federation is the best of both worlds, and I’m willing to deal with some of the frustrations of that structure.
I personally enjoy some regional centralization like you get in the Fediverse, if you really don’t like any instance’s policies, you can spin up your own personal instance and federate with the instances you want.
For me, the unifying nature of the All-feed allows me to enjoy the specific content I am seeking while still being stationed in a specific instance that generally caters to my preferences.
oh yeah man. the internet was just dead in 2013 ???
I don’t mean to be critical, but you complain about having to use multiple instances, then refer to Facebook and Twitter, and I can only assume you used Reddit or something similar, as well. So, two or three silos are two or three silos, whether it be those I listed or Lemmy, Mastodon and kbin (is that even the same as the other two? I don’t know). Now, I can appreciate you wanting something more unified, but we didn’t have that before and we’re closer now.
OTOH, if you’re talking multiple instances of a single fediverse app such as Lemmy, that’s entirely up to you and where you decide to hang your hat. I pretty much just use one and it works well enough as long as defederation doesn’t hit you.
I’ve been on Mastodon for a year now and have no problem finding people to follow. Mostly through boosts by people I already know or by following hashtags. I don’t ever go to local or federated timelines. But my goal is not to have a constant stream of new content, so I’m not actively looking for people anymore. I want to open it 2-3 times a day for a few minutes and be able to see most of what happened.
Hashtags should be your main focus though. That’s how you find people and content of your interest.
