You start out by bemoaning the onboarding experience and then move on to portability and then speak up the idea servers should just be relays and browsers should be the new world order.
Yes, onboarding definitely needs to be improved.
Yes, portability can be improved. Lemmy falls short of Mastodon and not even Mastodon is perfect.
But, what mastodon does so is foster does do excellently is foster the idea that social media is a tool and that users shouldn’t be overly attached. Also, perhaps if we learn to value servers, so not treat them as mere relays, perhaps we’ll be able to teach value and independence.
The problem is, too many people keep trying to think, how can we make the Fediverse relevant in the modern world? And the better question is, how can we redefine the modern world? How can we normalize the idea of cooperative servers? Whether friends, towns, cities, etc. How can we make it so the people running the servers that host our communities are committed and engaged and not running them at a deficit? I would even go as far as to say that there should be government schemes to repurpose old computers into mini servers and that governments should give everyone a domain like NAME.TOWN.CITY and everyone can run a personal server and get used to it and then they can grow from there.
I agree with pretty much everything you’ve stated except for:
The problem is, too many people keep trying to think, how can we make the Fediverse relevant in the modern world?
I dont think this is a problem. The fediverse accomplishes exactly what it sought to do, a decentralized social network. This is uncharted territory and has been working out surprisingly well. I thought I would be off this 2 months after reddit killed 3rd party clients, but here I am!!
the minute we start to push growth at any cost is the minute the fediverse quality declines, in my opinion.
My idea is actually instead of marketing lemmy and mastodon, like “join Lemmy!” Or “Join Mastodon!” Market each individual instance separately.
After speaking with non-technical friends, I began to think how the key to marketing, onboarding, and growth will be to reduce the friction of the fediverse. The technical aspects of the fediverse (such as instances) and even the word “fediverse” itself should be behind a curtain.
Unfortunately, Lemmy’s current default frontend does not do a good job at welcoming non-technical users (i.e. needing to find and select instances, fediverse jargon, etc.). Not to mention the lack of common accessibility features
Ultimately, I think the 3rd party devs building accessible and frictionless frontends will be key in this respect.
With that being said, I think a better marketing strategy is to say “join this app” (which connects them to the Lemmy/Mastodon network) because I imagine the bounce rate of the default Lemmy onboarding is not great.
Also instances aren’t really helpful in this regard either. “Feddit” just sounds like “fake reddit” and it carries that reddit baggage. “Lemmy.world” and “lemmy.ml” has lemmy in the name so you have to explain lemmy which is off-putting. Stuff like Beehaw, Sopuli, etc, do well. I think Beehaw is actually a good example as well as it has it’s own personal identity as well as being a federated forum.
Also, perhaps if we learn to value servers, so not treat them as mere relays, perhaps we’ll be able to teach value and independence.
If you want to be independent, the only thing that matters is the ability to able to roam around and port our identity and data wherever we want. Where you are doing your computing doesn’t really matter.
government schemes to repurpose old computers into mini servers and that governments should give everyone a domain like NAME.TOWN.CITY and everyone can run a personal server and get used to it and then they can grow from there.
We don’t need any of that. Computing power and storage is so cheap nowadays that even people in middle-income areas can afford to collect piles of used smartphones on their desk drawers. If there was any type of economic demand for what you are saying, we would have seen by now some company trying to make a business out of it.
Computing power and storage is so cheap nowadays that even people in middle-income areas can afford to collect piles of used smartphones on their desk drawers.
I think that’s a dangerous assumption to make. Not everyone is as well off as ourselves. Some people can’t even afford a desk, let alone have a desk drawer full of old phones.
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On average, we are rich enough to have plenty of gadgets around.
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Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.
- Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.
We’re going down a sidetrack here but this is just false. A smartphone these days is a ticket to many things required to live. Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.
Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.
None of these things are even close to be available to people in extreme poverty.
Think “no access to running water or sewage systems” levels of poverty, not “living in a ghetto area of an European or North American country”.
Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.
Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won’t even need cell coverage.
I was using old smartphones as an example of the amount of excess computing power available which goes unused, not what people can do with it.
Your argument is just missing the point and annoying sophistry. Can you please just drop it?
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That’s a nice idea but has some pretty obvious technical drawbacks that aren’t discussed in the blog article:
The complexity of most networks grows about exponentially with the number of connections between the entities. It gets immensely more computationally expensive that way and you’re bound to use lots of additional network traffic and total cpu power that way.
And some (a lot of) people like using social media on their phones instead of a computer. You’re bound to drain their batteries real fast by moving application logic there.
Other than that I like the general idea. The Fediverse should be more dynamic. Caching and discovery have some big issues in the current form. That should be tackled and we need technical solutions for that. And the current architecture isn’t perfect at all.
Furthermore, if talking about the edge where networks are smarter… Why then move it into the browser which isn’t at the edge? Wouldn’t that be an argument to invent edge-routers like in edge computing? I mean with c2s you have a server on the one side and a client on the other side with the edge somewhere in between. If you now flip it you end up in a different situation. But there’s still nothing at the edge where you could introduce some smarts…
And some (a lot of) people like using social media on their phones instead of a computer. You’re bound to drain their batteries real fast by moving application logic there.
Messaging applications (that need to be online all the time) don’t have this issue. Mobile email clients are even more conservative in resource usage. Why would an AP client be any different?
You are not going to be transcoding video or executing complex machine learning analysis on the device. I can reasonably argue that a local-first AcvitityPub application would be no different in resource usage than something like a modern XMPP or Matrix client.
Why would an AP client be any different?
A Matrix app connects to a Matrix server, same for XMPP and email. Sometimes they might connect to a few more for extra accounts.
An AP client in the way you’re describing will need to connect to thousands of servers (at least). The whole point of federation is that you get content from a large network but through a single source.
connect to thousands of servers
So does a web browser. So does a mobile Lemmy client like Jerboa. “Connecting to thousands of servers” doesn’t mean anything, if these connections are sporadic and uncorrelated.
When you first sign up to a account, you might be greeted with a list of recommended users to follow. This list can be configured by the server admin, but in any case it will only be able to show you accounts that are from the same server as yours or from a server that already “federates” with it.
How will you get a list of users on different servers without connecting to them?
When you run a search query, you are running the query through the server, and again the results are only a reflection of the data that has been “seen” by the server.
Changing this will require the client to search through a bunch of servers itself, or use a 3rd party search engine.
The “trending hashtags” feature only works for tags that have been explicitly approved by the instance admin.
How will you get trending hashtags from servers without connecting to them?
The server provides different sorting methods for posts and comments, such as “Hot”, “Active”, “Newest”, etc. There is no way for the user to define their own sorting method.
How would you fetch posts, their score and comments from servers without connecting to them?
How will you get a list of users on different servers without connecting to them?
In the same way that a RSS reader knows which feeds to download?
Changing this will require the client to search through a bunch of servers itself, or use a 3rd party search engine.
Yes, but the 3rd party search engine can be specialized. It could be a service that indexes all of the fediverse, or it could be a “standard” search query with some special operators.
How would you fetch posts, their score and comments from servers without connecting to them?
Your application will already receive updates from the communities you are subscribed to. In the case where you want to browse by /all, then yes, on first load your client will be making a bunch of queries to different servers that have communities to get a list of updates. But this would be an issue only on first load, because subsequent queries would be “give me all events that happened since the last time I visited”.
But if you really don’t want to run this on your device, then how about this: someone develops a “client” which is actually an aggregator of all the different instances which can then be used as web service that provides an API for end-users. This way, we still get to enjoy a distributed system, we still have a client-first application and we also get the benefit of having a service that makes it easier for the people who think that “federation is too complicated for non-techies.”
In the same way that a RSS reader knows which feeds to download?
I meant how will you fetch a list of users from which you could generate recommendations.
Yes, but the 3rd party search engine can be specialized. It could be a service that indexes all of the fediverse, or it could be a “standard” search query with some special operators.
I guess with proper integration for different search engines (or maybe just something like Searx) this could be useful.
Your application will already receive updates from the communities you are subscribed to. In the case where you want to browse by /all, then yes, on first load your client will be making a bunch of queries to different servers that have communities to get a list of updates. But this would be an issue only on first load, because subsequent queries would be “give me all events that happened since the last time I visited”.
Currently a Lemmy app loads all posts from a single server (which in turn, aggregates posts from different servers), and then loads stuff like images from their respective hosts. With your suggestion, every post might come from a different server, any of which might be temporarily down (not uncommon unfortunately). Caching will make this issue and the other issues less severe, but it won’t solve them.
I don’t disagree with the idea BTW, I just honestly think it’s not practical (at least with ActivityPub).
With your suggestion, every post might come from a different server.
Why? Take our interaction, for example. the community is on lemmy.world, you are on lemm.ee and I’m on communick.news. My response generates an activity that is sent to LW, and LW then announces that activity to all the servers who have at least one subscriber. If LW went down, you wouldn’t be able to see this message until it came back up and it started processing the federation queue again. Right?
The same thing would happen in a “message-relay” system. My client would send a message to LW, and LW would then send the activity to lemm.ee, which would then “push” it to you. If any of the servers went offline, the whole process would stop at the node that is offline and would then resume when it came back up.
