If you don’t know, Reddit updated their interface in February and made it worse by doing so. People who tolerated the older “new” interface can find a way to use that (at new.reddit) while the older interface is still there too (old.reddit).

Still, it seems like Reddit keeps making changes to drive away their older user base which hypothetically is drawing in new users (otherwise it seems a bit silly for them to be doing those changes).

I’m on the Samsung A54 right now. I had one too many times using Google devices which decided to suddenly die on me (Nexus 5x, Google Pixel 4a) and Internet mummers seem to hint that newer Pixel devices seem to be continuing that same lack reliability. I have an older Samsung tablet that is still working (better described as something that just won’t die) so I decided to try the Samsung world of things to see if I can get the reliability I desire. So far, so good.

Curious about the Google device issues? The Nexus 5x worked great until it just died for good one night. The Pixel 4a worked great until it “turned off” at night making me miss all my alarms and requiring me to turn it back on. Now it is a coin toss if it will stay on overnight or just turn off for no reason making me miss all alarms. Apparently it can turn off when you are not using it which is a bit concerning for a device that should receive phone calls and sound alarms…

Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues?

We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working. They want to easily register here and have a smooth experience. They cannot easily register because they need to know a few things (like where to register) and if their experience will be significantly lousy if they make any mistakes. This is for both people providing content (users) and people managing communities (moderators) who also need to know that their jobs won’t be significantly harder when they come over here.

Great work on the https://fediverser.network/ site! A simple guided pathway towards a great Lemmy instance (and perhaps a Lemmy instance which hosts many communities that they want to interact with) would be a welcome addition. Perhaps there could be a similar guided pathway for mods trying to find a great place to set up their community would be helpful as well.

I think that you would first want to have people using both services and annoyances/problems with one service will cause people to abandon the lousy place to use the better place.

That being said, the Lemmy instance I registered to had broken federation approximately half the time and was down for significantly long amounts of time as well. People interacting there had their comments take a long time to federate (only catching up during the rare times federation would work) and they had no idea that they were shouting into a closed box during that time. I’m not even addressing other federation issues such as this instance being blocked by another instance (Beehaw) which is causing some fragmentation.

Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”. You can create your community there as well. You then run into the “annoyances/problems” relating to your smaller instance and migrate to a more stable option… which is Reddit which you still use.

So while federation is a strength for Lemmy, it is also a weakness when it doesn’t work. Migrating people to Lemmy doesn’t tend to focus on migration to a specific server (like lemmy.world ) but focuses instead on migration to “Lemmy” which can be any random server under the sun (stable or not, reliable or overloaded, federating reliably or not). Once issues come up, the person could move to another Lemmy server or they can move back to Reddit… and I think many choose the Reddit option.

It doesn’t help that federation is a complicated topic to understand and the recommended new user approach to Lemmy is to join a tiny server where you are required to use federation and to hope that it is working (while also having no obvious indication if federation is working today or not). To use the email analogy, I get a “bounce back” email notice if my email being sent out cannot be delivered and I get that notice quickly. With broken federation, I have to do research and visiting external sites to determine if my message got through or if I am even receiving any new messages at all. People can get a little annoyed when things are mysteriously not working or when things “may be working or not, who knows?”.

With AI comes the potential for systems to detect AI generated content as well. Any system tends to have a counter system made against it but for a while things are a bit unbalanced.

A search engine company making their own AI system turns that system towards analyzing all of their search results. The AI is to determine if the content is genuine human based content and useful for other humans while filtering out SEO generated nonsense, AI generated fluff, and other low tier results. In other words, search results improve because of in depth analysis of the site content (of a sort that only AI requires).

While I’m sure that system wouldn’t hold out the garbage websites forever, it should improve search result quality for some duration of time. Since AI is a rather new topic, it isn’t obvious how one would “game” that system so that should keep the search results better for longer. Hopefully such AI classification systems can also categorize styles of sites allowing you to select what style results you want for your search query (such categories as a site is more scientific research, written more for children, better for people with short attention spans, etc.)

AI search categorization could have some pretty significant drawbacks but the overall result has a good chance of being better than what we have now…