[NoboruWataya]

This is why I think federated alternatives like Lemmy are important and I would like to see communities migrate there instead of some other corporate walled garden. Otherwise we'll just be having the exact same discussion about some other website in five years. It pains me to see even a lot of FOSS-focused communities move their discussions to Discord, for example.

Most of the criticisms of the federated platforms centre around how they are difficult to use for the average user and could never achieve the scale that Reddit has. The difficulty point is a valid one and work should probably be done on that. But at a certain point I just don't really care, particularly about the scale point. The communities that are valuable to me aren't the huge ones full of "average users", they are (mostly) smaller communities full of people interested in tech and FOSS in particular. I can figure out federation and so can most of the people I probably want to hear from.

I don't mean any of this to sound elitist, I just feel like people who browse /r/pics and people who browse /r/selfhosted (for example) are probably different user bases with different preferences. If Reddit were to keep the former while the latter were to move to some other, slightly less seamless but more sustainable platform, maybe everyone wins.

There are, of course, a few non-technical subreddits I like that would fall through the gaps here, in that their average user might not appreciate a federated alternative. In days of yore those communities would have inhabited forums; I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of those.

[tensor]

I'd love to see something without federation, but using a wikipedia style model to support it. I don't think federation will ever be sufficiently simple for the majority of people to adopt, and I think the world needs a world forum that is accessible for everyone, not just tech people.

[ImaCake]

I tentatively disagree here. The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance. Once you are using it the experience could be made frictionless.

I think a big problem people have had with trying to join federated socials is that they did it when everyone else tried it and thus the system failed. And so people think its really hard when its just been technical issues with onboarding people.

[troad]

> The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance.

This is a bigger problem than fans of federation acknowledge, though. Human beings have multi-faceted identities, and fediverse instances tend to be quite narrowly focused.

The average person is rightly going to assume that 'A collection of Marxist communities' - to take a real instance description from near the top of the join-lemmy.org list - is probably going to be mostly about Marxism, and not really about, say, knitting, or motorcycle maintenance. And even if a given person is in fact a Marxist, they're not going to see 'a collection of Marxist communities' as a replacement for Reddit, where they can talk about Marxism, motorcycles, and knitting.

You can explain to people all about federation and the ability to interact across different instances, but you're still asking them to make a home somewhere, and that entails choosing from amongst identities in a way that Reddit doesn't require, and that most people don't want to do. You're also putting them at the whim of their home instance in a way that they aren't used to and may not like (what if the Marxist instance defederates / blocks the users from the motorcycle instance, due to their insufficient revolutionary zeal?).

[ImaCake]

I agree with the problem of federation identity but suspect this is partly an “image problem” in the sense that less specific and broader identities are a fix.

As for being subject to the whims of the instance; that is no different to reddit/twitter admin who also push ideological agendas. In fact, federation allows you to at least migrate to a different regime, something that neither commercial site permits.

[gonehome]

I don't think federated systems without something like urbit underneath will work outside of a hyper technical niche. You end up back at a handful of even crappier centralized servers with a worse experience and even more capricious mods - a worst of both worlds.

The reason centralized ad-based companies are so successful is the centralization solves serious UX problems that are unsolvable by systems that are not centralized. You need a unified platform where users share an underlying system that stuff can be built on top of that they can actually own, where the details of the system are hidden and it's possible to actually get UX/discovery/auth that is just as good as centralized systems. It has to solve for the problems that lead to centralization. [0]

This stuff will only work when to an average user they have no idea they're even on a system that isn't centralized, just looks like a normal app. You can't get there without solving bigger issues upstream from the app itself. [1]

[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...

[1]: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...