[SemioticStandrd]

It’s kinda like email. You wouldn’t create an account with Google and expect that login to work anywhere else, would you? But your Gmail email address can send and receive to anyone else from any provider.

As far as which instance to join, well, that’s kinda like email, too. Look at the instances that are out there (the email providers in this example, like Gmail vs Mailfence), see if you like their policies and moderation and community “vibe,” and join the one that suits you.

https://beehaw.org is a big one that I like very much. Not really any memes there, the user base tends more toward the mature and considerate, and overall the level of interaction feels much better than Reddit ever did, post Digg exodus.

[vlz]

> It’s kinda like email.

Ok, that does not sound reassuring. What does that mean for my account if the server I am on disappears? Can I still login? Will my posts disappear? (probably not, but join-lemmy.org doesn‘t say if I am not mistaken)

My email provider has some way to make money. There is a good chance that it is around in 10 years. What about these servers? Who is running them and why should a single one still be around in 10 years?

If the choice of a server really is not important, why doesn’t join-lemmy.org have a "join random server" button.

Maybe these are non-issues. As a casually interested person I genuinely don’t know.

[KingMachiavelli]

For the largest instances, as long as people are using lemmy in 10 years then they have incentive to exist... People will donate as needed; it isn't terrible complicated or expensive to run an instance.

IME the reason they don't have a "join random" button is that would be bad for smaller instances and a "join largest and most popular instance" would be criticized for showing favoritism and discourage adopting the entire point of decentralized technology. Matrix gets this criticism all the time because they push a default sever in their defacto standard app Element.

As a casually interested user? Just Google what to do because more users will trust the latest tweet or reddit thread more than a FAQ page. You most likely created an email account without going to "email.acme.org" and asking what provider to pick and probably have gone though a few providers without much loss.

[impissedoff1]

"just Google it" is really off-putting. I found a great infographic for Lemmy...

https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/c34aab77-9c37-4264-b821-750...

And a beginners guide

https://github.com/amirzaidi/lemmy

[esperent]

> It’s kinda like email

... From a technical perspective. But most people don't care about that. It's a social network, and they want to use it as one. They already have the experience of reddit, where there's thousands of seamless communities and one account gives you access to all of them. Lemmy feels like a big step back for anyone who doesn't care about the technical details. Which is basically everyone.

[wdh505]

The user base is largely techy (I think many came from a post from HN). There are a ton of bugs, and most were unnoticed until the users grew from 20k and now is 2M. Lemmy&kbin&mastadon and its associated FOSS android apps (other than browsers) have a lot of growing pains right now. Thankfully, growing pains do not include all 57M of reddit right now, but the users who did come are heavy hitters and power users (moderators).

I expect that Lemmy will grow and some of the frictions (bugs, unclear accounts, insane instance sysadmins, moderation tools at the community/magazine/subreddit level, moderation tools at the instance/server level, etc.) will decrease in time. The two biggest threats are 1) too many consuming-only users and 2) big-tech (im looking at you Facebook) deciding that they need to directly compete.

[RalfWausE]

>But most people don't care about that. It's a social network, and they want to use it as one

I would honestly say: "Fuck them"

The Web was a better place before it was too easy to use and the unwashed masses entered. If they don't want to learn... let them stay in their walled garden.

[merdaverse]

I've seen plenty of extremely competenet tech people try out Mastodon and then quit because they couldn't bother with the UX and all the problems federation brings.

So no, it's not just "unwashed masses", it's people who value their time too much to spend it on some social media technical issues.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

>extremely competenet tech people

I'm not competent with tech (I'm not a developer, just a lurker on HN) and I find Mastodon as easy as email if you understand email.

What are these tech people competent about? Do they understand email, at least conceptually?

[replwoacause]

100% agree.

[HKH2]

Right. Reddit isn't going anywhere.

[tw04]

> You wouldn’t create an account with Google and expect that login to work anywhere else, would you?

There are literally thousands of sites that let you login with your google account.

[Dalewyn]

And I've used precisely none of them.

Why would I deliberately tie multiple logins to one credential, which may or may not go out of my control for any or no reason whatsoever? I'm not even talking about Google specifically here, I'm talking in general terms.

The more I hear about the federated multiverse, the more I see it as just another centralization abstraction layer on the decentralized network that is the internet.

If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?

[jochem9]

> The more I hear about the federated multiverse, the more I see it as just another centralization abstraction layer on the decentralized network that is the internet.

> If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?

I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion. The internet is indeed already decentralized, yet connected, allowing you to traverse networks to reach resources that are more often than not outside your 'home' network.

Federated social media is exactly that, but for posting and interacting with content. Its killer feature is that you don't have to create an account everywhere, but are able to interact from your home instance with any other instance in the network. Exactly like the internet.

If we'd go back to ye olde days, it would be like pre-internet from a network perspective. Having to log in physically on a specific network to access its resources. Or when talking about the internet until ~2008 (and to some extent still true): creating a separate account for every forum you'd want to participate in.

[Barrin92]

convenience is the obvious one, normal people don't enjoy handling 50 different accounts. The less obvious but arguably more important one is safety. In ye olde days and still today random sites generally don't really know what they're doing and with OAuth you're not leaking your data to some server in a basement that get's pwned every few weeks. If you use Google or an equivalent service to login you retain control over your credentials.

[syslog]

And then Google decides for no discernable reason to lock your account, making it impossible to login _anywhere_.

I get the convenience and also the security benefits, but there‘s a whole lot of risk, too.

[rewmie]

> There are literally thousands of sites that let you login with your google account.

I fail to see how "but everybody is doing it" is a valid argument.

[MissTake]

Not it's not like email for the simple reason that instances can, and often do, block other instances.

When's the last time you heard of Fastmail saying that they were now blocking all emails from Zoho because they didn't like the way a single Zoho user was using Zoho?

Yet this is the sort of thing we see in the Fediverse when one admin takes issue with another admins attitude.

[tovster]

Your analogy happens quite often. Not specifically with Zoho, but if a specific domain is sending spam, your email provider will usually block it at the spam filtering end of it.

[MissTake]

It can, yes, but it's invariably because of a usually valid business decision rather than an admin personal grievience.

I get defederating from known bad actors, but these days it's not uncommon to lose access to an instance because admin don't like other admin policies (ergo some defederation over "The_Donald")

[jfax]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_Prevention_Early_Warning_...

[Gigachad]

The annoying thing is that links don’t work properly. If someone links to a post, you won’t be logged in when you click it.

This is also a problem with mastodon. As well as the fact that instances constantly shut down or have insane admins.

[NoboruWataya]

What I would love to see is a browser extension that recognises when you are browsing a Lemmy instance and allows you to seamlessly interact with it from your "home" instance.

[cynber]

This is actually something I'm working on!

It's not perfectly seamless, because I wanted to minimize the risk that it will redirect some non-lemmy site with matching URL structure/elements. However, I've tried to make it as seamless as possible.

https://lemmy.ca/c/instance_assistant

[Gigachad]

Honestly what I'd like to see is a centralised reddit replacement that covers the majority of features and UX that old reddit had. I tried voat when it first came out and it seemed to work pretty well. Only issue is it was quickly overwhelmed by racists.

Lemmy is probably taking on too large of a problem. No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet.

[NoboruWataya]

> No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet.

They never will. Federated systems have certain advantages over centralised ones. One of the principal advantages is that it allows hosting costs to be shared more widely, which means you don't need a single entity with hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the thing. Another is that toxic communities can be more easily isolated from the rest (so that the communities you like don't become quickly overwhelmed by racists).

One of the disadvantages is that there is more friction than a single, centralised system. It is, by definition, not as seamless. The seams are the feature. It's just the trade-off you make.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fediact/ ?

[RivieraKid]

As a user, I don't care whether it's like email or not. I just want a Reddit clone without the API changes.

[etler]

The point is that it's distributed so no one instance can go power crazy and abuse a monopoly on the platform. If you want to keep using centralized services then the same cycle will happen again and again.

[timeon]

I'm afraid there are not many options for you then.

[RivieraKid]

I wasn't asking whether it exists, I know it doesn't.

[ipaddr]

Just pay for api access if that's all you need

[rewmie]

> Just pay for api access if that's all you need

The comments suggest the API pricing was just a stunt to hide the fact that Reddit wanted to kill third party apps in general, and in particular the ability of third parties to use Reddit posts to train AI models.

That's not an option. Even if it was, reddit's tone deaf measures, such as undeleting accounts and threatening everyone and kicking out mods who protested, already killed the community and makes the decision of continuing to use Reddit as a questionable moral decision.

People seek a reddit alternative, and rewarding reddit for its bullshit stunts is not it.

[Angelwings93]

That doesn't solve the problem

The problem is the apps people like to use are no longer available, and Reddit doesn't permit them to just accept user API keys instead

[RivieraKid]

I want to use Reddit Sync like before. Now I can't even if I was willing to pay for it.

[wildekek]

The kind of email where I need to log in to multiple servers to find out on which server I sent a particular email? It's not like email at all from a user perspective. I really like the GUI's (like wefwef) that are built around Lemmy, but the federation approach they chose now is not useful for users in any way. If you can't explain which server has what benefit (let alone the advantage of choice) then don't give users a choice.

[bjornasm]

>It’s kinda like email. You wouldn’t create an account with Google and expect that login to work anywhere else, would you? But your Gmail email address can send and receive to anyone else from any provider.

But it isn't. People aren't looking for an alternative to email.