How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
It’s frustrating how many non-joiners are completely turned off by the part where you hunt for an instance to join. They act like it’s super confusing and scary (when in fact it’s ‘super easy, barely an inconvenience’).
Meanwhile these same people will scour the internet looking for a recipe or bootleg movie or whatever.
It’s really frustrating when you remember what a huge PITA it is to get your account going on reddit. Sure, the first part is easy enough, it’s just registering on the site. But then you find you can’t do jack shit because you don’t have enough karma and every sub you visit has 10,000 arbitrary byzantine rules to deal with because the mods got picked on in high school.
Lemmy is actually EASIER than reddit. But here we are.
Yeah, you join a general instance, get everything set up the way you want it, get comfortable using it for a couple of months, then it goes down. You track down the instance admins Mastodon account to see if there is an update. There is a single post saying “I’m aware this is down and I’m working on it.” You check several days later, no updates on your lemmy instance but several hundred cat photos each day and announcements about how “Mastodon was successfully updated!” Months go by, you think to yourself “maybe I should just go back to Reddit.” More cat toots, more info on the Mastodon instance, no lemmy news.
So after waiting for months, you decide to pick another instance. All of your old content is gone forever, so you try to rebuild. You start adding your communities back only to find out the admin has decided to defederate from the instances several of those communities are on for whatever reasons there may be. Your choices are to find another instance or find new communities hosted somewhere that you can access. You give up and just read whatever’s on the feed. You play with the sorting options and find out they all kinda suck because you’re using lemmy wrong, but find some good content and some people you’re happy to interact with. You get past the five to ten posts with any sort of engagement, it’s just bot spam with no engagement whatsoever and porn.
Yeah, because geddit.social and lemmyloves.art are super controversial. Meanwhile I’m on sh.it just.works and can’t interact with anything on beehaw and several others.
You’re absolutely correct though, everyone should join lemmy.world, because federation means “consolidating everything to a single instance.”
I am full-on 100% in the fediverse. Hand waving and dismissing any and all problems is not productive in any way. Everyone should be joining whatever instance they want and be able access anything that is available, unfortunately in its current state that isn’t really possible. Telling people it is and then completely dismissing my personal experience attempting to do that exact thing, while simultaneously making a strawman ad hominem attack will surely convince people that this is a warm, welcoming place.
I just dont have problems with any of my accounts idk what to tell you. The first month it was awful. But now its a stable experience on most instances.
On aussie.zone here, beehaw basically died from defederation. I used to see their posts all the time but now only once a month or so. Being defederated with them isn’t that bad
It’s frustrating how many non-joiners are completely turned off by the part where you hunt for an instance to join. They act like it’s super confusing and scary (when in fact it’s ‘super easy, barely an inconvenience’).
Meanwhile these same people will scour the internet looking for a recipe or bootleg movie or whatever.
It’s really frustrating when you remember what a huge PITA it is to get your account going on reddit. Sure, the first part is easy enough, it’s just registering on the site. But then you find you can’t do jack shit because you don’t have enough karma and every sub you visit has 10,000 arbitrary byzantine rules to deal with because the mods got picked on in high school.
Lemmy is actually EASIER than reddit. But here we are.
It really is:
Its that easy to get started. You can always make a new account later if you decide you don’t like your instance because accounts don’t matter.
Yeah, you join a general instance, get everything set up the way you want it, get comfortable using it for a couple of months, then it goes down. You track down the instance admins Mastodon account to see if there is an update. There is a single post saying “I’m aware this is down and I’m working on it.” You check several days later, no updates on your lemmy instance but several hundred cat photos each day and announcements about how “Mastodon was successfully updated!” Months go by, you think to yourself “maybe I should just go back to Reddit.” More cat toots, more info on the Mastodon instance, no lemmy news.
So after waiting for months, you decide to pick another instance. All of your old content is gone forever, so you try to rebuild. You start adding your communities back only to find out the admin has decided to defederate from the instances several of those communities are on for whatever reasons there may be. Your choices are to find another instance or find new communities hosted somewhere that you can access. You give up and just read whatever’s on the feed. You play with the sorting options and find out they all kinda suck because you’re using lemmy wrong, but find some good content and some people you’re happy to interact with. You get past the five to ten posts with any sort of engagement, it’s just bot spam with no engagement whatsoever and porn.
Lemmy.world, first account here, still truckin’. Don’t make an account on kid.touchers and you’ll be fine. Don’t listen to this guys world salad.
Yeah, because geddit.social and lemmyloves.art are super controversial. Meanwhile I’m on sh.it just.works and can’t interact with anything on beehaw and several others.
You’re absolutely correct though, everyone should join lemmy.world, because federation means “consolidating everything to a single instance.”
I am full-on 100% in the fediverse. Hand waving and dismissing any and all problems is not productive in any way. Everyone should be joining whatever instance they want and be able access anything that is available, unfortunately in its current state that isn’t really possible. Telling people it is and then completely dismissing my personal experience attempting to do that exact thing, while simultaneously making a strawman ad hominem attack will surely convince people that this is a warm, welcoming place.
I just dont have problems with any of my accounts idk what to tell you. The first month it was awful. But now its a stable experience on most instances.
On aussie.zone here, beehaw basically died from defederation. I used to see their posts all the time but now only once a month or so. Being defederated with them isn’t that bad
THERE ARE TOOLS:
Personnaly I can understand how it can seem difficult for not so geeky people.
It’s not difficult, but scary for normal people.
Using a single search engine with hand holding is not the same as assuming you found the right site, a compatible app and then connecting them.
Most people don’t even touch their browser settings. Many also don’t touch their phone settings.