Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse.
Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world
Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform.
No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github.
It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one?
These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point.
USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.
Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it.
Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when those values and decisions directly cause effects they follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
> An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the fediverse. The philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communications as a society. It implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community. Your egocentric, utilitarian, self-obsessed mindset is the complete opposite.
I can't be really surprised to see this on hn, but oh well.
Nothing about cleaner onboarding requires anyone to compromise principles. And nothing about a guiding philosophy requires you constantly evangelize. Let the merits of the system speak for itself.
> implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community
Then the sign-up page is a poll test. Democratic ambition strives to make participation easy. That doesn't mean the act of participating is easy. Just that we identify needless barriers and ideological tests as undemocratic. As a result, democracies--time and again--outcompete their centralized peers.
What I'm seeing is not competitive, and it is not democratic. It's closer to theological. I'm hopeful that someone will embrace these principles more productively so we have middle ground between Huffman-Musk and crypto/web3.
- Servers choose what they want to host and what their personal bandwidth limit is
- A user visiting a specific subforum automatically downloads from whatever servers are currently available to serve it
Then you’d never have to manually choose a server.
Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.
This has to be parody.
USENET also had the "chose the wrong server" problem.
If I chose my ISP (e.g. Verizon) as my USENET entry point, then I would miss out on many newsgroups that Verizon didn't have. Or, Verizon had the newsgroup but had extremely short retention of old messages history.
So, I paid $12.99/month for GigaNews to get all the newsgroups with months-to-years retention.
Lemmy/Mastodon/etc replicate the same federation issues as USENET because running servers costs money and different people have different thresholds of spending. This independence/freedom of the admin running the server the particular way they want is touted as a positive but it also has inherent disadvantages.
The contemporary situation of Beehaw instance defederating lemmy.world -- is replaying the same tradeoffs that USENET went through. (E.g. similar to an ISP's USENET service choosing not to carry alt.binaries.* or whatever.) Beehaw explains they have limited resources and can't handle the influx from lemmy.world. Yep. Very understandable.
It creates the possibility for a business model where subscribers pay for access to a big news spool and lots of groups. Just like USENet.
There will be some growing pains, but there will eventually be a continuum of "free" lemmy servers, for pay premium ones, and lemmy servers where the front end is only an app on your phone.
And they'll all see the same messages.
I think you should re-evaluate that assumption:
https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+instances+blocks+ga...
https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blocklists
https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blacklists
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/kw8jht/how_do_i_s...
Also, expand the ">Moderated servers" heading and scroll down through the instances they block:
https://mastodon.social/about#unavailable-content
Why do different Mastodon instances decide on not federating some of the other instances?!? It's because the owners pay money for running their particular server which makes them feel entitled to run it the way they want.
The "pick any server, it doesn't make any difference, you'll see _all_ messages anyway" -- is not realistic given that each fediverse node administrator can exercise their freedom to choose what messages their server accepts.
Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.
How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?
IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a centralized alternative that worked when they were born.
It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely glacial pace with very uneven support across various networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts of channel management had to be done through a bot. Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord starts causing problems for its userbase.
I think there were many options at the time.
Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim.
Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks.
I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't have a sustainable differentiated product based on negatives. (as in, this is not the bad guy). You need to have something in the affirmative
The nostr community right now mostly want to replace twitter rather than reddit, but in principle it would be possible.
Now that I've been on Mastodon and Lemmy, it makes more sense, but this is a HUGE barrier to adoption.
The mega pun is that if you are hard working, intelligent and reasonable this is going to be incredibly hard for you. You are going to need help from someone who is non of those things.
I would argue they are. Any of the servers will work fine. There needs to be a paradigm shift that only things that are centrally managed and have a profit motive are good.
