this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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What non-technical criticisms do you have of the Lemmy/kbin/link aggregator fediverse experience? (septic.win)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.

I find hard to find new niche communities. All is all, the common denominator. My home is what I already have subscribed. Local instance communities are there. But I don know a good way to get offended content from communities outside of those categories.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There's a few different community browsers:

browse.fediverse.de

lemmyverse.net

It's still got the problem of being repetitive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

And there's not a great way to suggest "you might like..." based on your current subscriptions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

IMO, moderators of communities need to merge their communities. Identify which community is bigger and quite frankly push users to just use that one, to reduce the ambiguity over which one to use. The software ideally would also have an officially supported way to just close your community and transfer everyone's subscriptions to a different one, so that we don't have these duplicates confusingly still showing up in the listings.

I personally did this. I tried to create and promote a community I thought I was the first to make. When I learned it actually already existed (and just... didn't show up in search because of course not), I shuttered the one I made and pointed it at the other one.

What's bizarre to me is that the Android community even did switch to a different one... and then switched back to having two?? It's weird and I don't understand why they did it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.

1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it. 2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative. 3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong. 4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.

Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.

Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.

1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it.

2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative.

3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong.

4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.

Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.

Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
  1. I feel like this one is an issue either way. Even if it doesn't take out the entire community, taking out the largest community is pretty impactful. It worries me that the fediverse feels so fragile.
  2. I think that case is a perfectly valid one to create a new community over. I'm not saying there should never be duplicates, just that we shouldn't have them without a reason.
  3. Yeaaaah, I think defederation should be handled better and admins need more granular options so that they don't have to defederate except in the most extreme cases. The fact that some of the biggest instances can't be seen by some other instances (or at least one other) is weird and worrisome.
  4. I don't think this would be a reason to avoid smaller instances, but admittedly people will generally create communities on their instance. I don't think you even can create a community on another instance? You have to have someone on that instance create it and set you as a mod.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
  1. We already have a solution for this with tcp/ip with resiliency in the communication chain. Make the communities duplicated across servers and any server has a copy of the community.
  2. This is definitely an issue but maybe a mod would only be able to control via voting with other mods for that community across servers? Make it more democratic than autocratic? Mod actions should be public too. No working in the shadows allowed.
  3. You see this in gaming. People looking for interaction all swarm to the busy servers and you'll see dozens of servers all barely in use. Maybe your login should be load balanced and redirected to low use servers.

Agree it isn't simple. "We want control without control"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

1.- That would make Lemmy servers ultra unsafe to host. Server owners would not be able to moderate content hosted in their machine. It would make a good distributed solution, but not a federated one.

Maybe we’d prefer a centralized organization, with distributed resources. But seeing the defederation drama every week, it doesn’t look the path anyone wants to follow.