this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:

  1. Lemmy needs DIDs.

    No, not dissociative identity disorder, Decentralized Identities.

    The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it's up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.

    Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive "might not make it", and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.

    This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn't a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.

    *Banning the account could create the same issue.

  2. Communities need to federate too.

    Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.

Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.

What do you think?

EDIT: There's been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.

It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.

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Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.

On this point specifically, I think this idea is good. Multiple communities sharing a pool of aggregates that can moderators opt into. Great, I don't know how feasible that is with ActivityPub, but I hope it can be worked out once the dust has settled.

However, "fragmentation" is neither a problem, nor do I feel exists as things currently stand. If different servers want to host communities around a similar topic, that's not a bad thing. On Reddit, you had Gaming, Games, Truegaming, etc. They're all about playing games, video or otherwise, yet if you look at them at all you'll see they cater to almost completely different audiences. I don't NOT want ultra dominate monolithic groups. I think if their existed a single "Technology" community then that would be a failure of the fediverse.

Right now is a period of extremes, so don't evaluate communities too harshly. In the long run, I want to see dozens, maybe hundreds of small communities that maybe don't get a huge amount of traffic, but are none the less, active and interesting.

[–] noodlejetski@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Lemmy needs two things to be successful:

  1. users
  2. users

and it's already getting more and more of each of those.

[–] DaughterOfMars@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It won't get more users if it continues to be difficult to use.

[–] bumbly@readit.buzz 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. Create account
  2. interact with community
  3. ???
  4. Profit

Terribly difficult

[–] DaughterOfMars@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

Thank you for that insightful comment. You've really addressed my point in its entirety, and thoroughly proven me to be a dullard. I submit to your vast intelligence.

[–] Spzi@lemmy.click 9 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I mean ...

That's active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.

So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.

One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don't think it's right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren't.

[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 5 points 1 year ago

Twelve of those are mine, due partly to the very shortcomings being discussed here.

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[–] noodlejetski@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

people kept saying similar stuff about Mastodon, and yet, miraculously, its user base somehow keeps growing.

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[–] anji@lemmy.anji.nl 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

100% agreed with both. Especially DIDs just need to happen on all ActivityPub platforms. It will not only free users from being locked to an instance, but it will also allow instances to be much more flexible in scaling their capacity. Lemmy.ml is overloaded because they have too many users, and anyone who signed up there can no longer use their account. DID would allow them to immediately use their account from any small or large instance with spare capacity without changing the experience. The same would go for Mastodon.

[–] Butterbee@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It sounds like a moderation nightmare having people come over to your instance with a whole lot of content they've created that are now being hosted by your servers. You've got to look through the whole thing to make sure it is not breaking TOS of your instance. Doesn't sound great to me.

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[–] CasualTee@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

I like the idea of aggregating communities. Especially if the modding tools are powerful enough. This could lead to communities being essentially curated lists of other communities. Which is great for new users to discover new communities without being overwhelmed by the unordered list of communities on the instance.

Another feature that I'd like to see is an equivalent to the mastodon's lists, a way to aggregate communities for yourself. So that you could browse the content of communities sharing a same theme in a dedicated view.

[–] Mindless_Enigma@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Personally I don't know if Lemmy needs these to be successful. Depending on your viewpoint, Lemmy already is successful. Lemmy instances existed long before the current Reddit influx and seemed to be doing okay even if things were a bit slow.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site with the great benefit of federation allowing direct access and communication to other sites running in the fediverse. Identities and communities are specific to an instance because that instance is an independent community. In that frame of mind, having a different account on different instances and overlapping community topics between instances makes sense. Same way multiple forums have boards about the same topic and joining multiple forums meant multiple accounts. Federation just makes it easier to see across that gap.

[–] Deestan@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site

I think you are right, and I think a major contributor to this is how Lemmy is communicated. We are inviting people to a concept when they expect to be invited to a place.

"Join Lemmy!" indicates Lemmy is the site. A site. One coherent system. Then "and pick a federated server" just seems like random frustration.

"Join ! It's on Lemmy so you can easily contribute to the communities on Beehaw, lemmy.ml, toupoli, ... without creating separate accounts there." is how I think we should go about it.

[–] NuPNuA@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

That sounds highly inconvenient from a end user experience if I'm honest. As a predominantly mobile user having to have multiple accounts set up in app and remembering to change to the right one for each instance will get old quickly.

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[–] this_is_router@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I don't see the big problem in 1. Compare it to e-mail. If you want to switch provider you have to backup and restore your emails if you want to.

Nobody bats an eye that amiladresses contain a maildomain but with Lemmy everyone is used to the reddit way. Give it some time, people will get used to it.

The syncing and federation problems we are experiencing right now will get solved in the future, people will get used to the new naming scheme.

Point 2 is a great idea btw.

[–] DaughterOfMars@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Notice how everyone pretty much uses gmail? If gmail goes down you lose access to everything, but it won't because it's google and they have money to throw at problems. That's not true for Lemmy (and we don't want that because it leads to Reddit 2.0 where all power is centralized).

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There is also the additional issue of defederation, not just your instance stability. Like if you happen to be one of the 30k users on lemmy.world, or any of the smaller ones that got cut off from Beehaw because you trusted the "it doesn't matter where you make your account, it's all shared in the fediverse!" - if there's a constant risk Gmail decides to block all Hotmail users one day, creating a Gmail account in the first place seems like the safer bet.

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[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago

Point 1 is part of why I'm gonna start self-hosting a Lemmy instance at some point. If I host my own instance then I can back up my data and ensure it's never lost.

[–] catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

These are good points. It sucks that as a PhD student in CS, I still don't understand the workings of federation and other important Internet concepts. I hope someone smarter will work on this stuff, though.

[–] deedasmi@lemmy.timdn.com 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You don’t need an upfront detailed understanding of everything to get started. Contributing to projects like this is a research project like any other.

[–] catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago

That's fair. I think I should invest my time in contributing to third-party apps, though. That's a barrier to entry for newbies, I think, who want to be able to tap an app on their phone instead of going to a website. I believe Memmy uses Expo, which I might be able to contribute to.

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[–] BobQuasit@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree completely! And thanks for clearing up the disassociative identity disorder question, because I actually was wondering for a second. 😆

But if #1 is too hard, the ability to download all of your data from a login and possibly upload it to another account would be a good stopgap.

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[–] Ragoo@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For the second one there is an issue on github discussing it.

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[–] Manbart@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Just to add a little more context, here’s the W3C recommendation for DID:

https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

[–] retronautickz@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

1- You mean something along the lines of Hubzilla's nomadic identities? or how?

Nomadic Identity: The ability to authenticate and easily migrate an identity across independent hubs and web domains. Nomadic identity provides true ownership of an online identity, because the identities of the channels controlled by an account on a hub are not tied to the hub itself. A hub is more like a "host" for channels. With Hubzilla, you don't have an "account" on a server like you do on typical websites; you own an identity that you can take with you across the grid by using clones. Channels can have clones associated with separate and otherwise unrelated accounts on independent hubs. Communications shared with a channel are synchronized among the channel clones, allowing a channel to send and receive messages and access shared content from multiple hubs. This provides resilience against network and hardware failures, which can be a significant problem for self-hosted or limited-resource web servers. Cloning allows you to completely move a channel from one hub to another, taking your data and connections with you.

2- This is a good Idea. But I'm not sure how posible it is as of now

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[–] CookieJarObserver@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago

DID are kinda against the idea itself also a lot less private.

These are good observations that address concerns I am having that I didn’t know how to explain.

[–] BitOneZero@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy

Federation is not reliably delivering comments and other Lemmy content between servers. People need to be looking for such problems, so far there isn't any tool to observe or track this problem.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3101

[–] darkmugglet@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think point two is interesting, but only if the communities choose too. One of the interesting promises of federation is that you can have competing communities with different interests. I can completely see commerical interests hosting a server (e.g the NBA or NFL) that has strong brand identity as a place to interact with stars, and then the un-branded fan sites. IMO, the competition is what makes the Fediverse interesting, and seeing that play out is fascinating.

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[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A few points about #1 I did not see talked about. First global ID is of a lot less value on Forums then on things like Mastodon. At least the way I use forums I have no interest in building a persona. Frankly would prefer totally different IDs on different servers and frankly I think we should encourage people to be subject focused not persona focused on Lemmy anyway. There's to much of this ego stuff that goes on on other platforms.

The second thing is logging into multiple systems is a solved problem. If you do not have a password manager get one. Bitwarden or one of the LastPass versions depending on your platform for example. Another better way is SQRL or U2F. There is also a more recent thing, maybe PassKeys (?), cannot remember. In particular central authentication servers are nuts. Not even LastPass that specializes in them could do it correctly. Just NO. More then that let us not rebuild Reddit. We do not want central infrastructure.

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[–] reid@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think there's a third big thing: really good UX. I don't have an Android phone, so I don't know about Jerboa, but the web interface ... could use some work. I know the bug with new posts pushing the feed down is on track to be fixed soon, but wow, it can be really quite bad. iOS apps are getting way better quickly, too, but overall they're nascent.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but additionally, I think the ranking algorithm(s) could use some work. I can see there's tons of content, if I sort by new, but sorting by active results in stale posts, and sorting by hot doesn't seem to quite hit the sweet spot on tenured/good quality content vs. newness. The recent ranking bug(s) haven't helped matters there either.

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[–] Mintyytea@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

I think number 1 is important so it’s easier to move. Otherwise we could feel centralized to one instance rather than feeling free to federate

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 5 points 1 year ago (29 children)

Regarding point 1- if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-

Things would go much smoother!

Pick an instance based on uptime, or hell, create your own instance.

Piling all of the eggs into a single basket is destined to result in failure.

[–] DaughterOfMars@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

That's the issue though. Without a locked identity on an instance, people will naturally choose the option they think is least likely to disappear in a few weeks.

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[–] sphere_au@reddthat.com 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think these are "nice to have" features rather than absolutely essential, but:

For 1. I could deal with just being able to download my list of subscriptions and upload it to another server. That's the only bit that's really slow to copy over by hand.

For 2. I think the main thing that really would benefit is the ability to search all active communities on all servers. The way it is now is alright if there are only half a dozen really active instances whose communities I might be interested in, but it doesn't scale if there are hundreds of servers to check out. Probably the more important of the two IMHO in the long run.

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[–] Skelectus@suppo.fi 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think these are such a big deal. Point 2 is cool, and sounds somewhat feasible, but I'd like to hear your plan to implement the first one. It's a lot of work, and I don't think it would affect flocking that much.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can create a one-person instance and hold your identity there.

If you what you want is for every server to hold your identity, you have to trust all servers. I think that an evil admin would be able to impersonate any user from any instance if that were the case. How do you delete your account? Can an any admin delete your account everywhere? Which one is the real "you"?

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[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 4 points 1 year ago

I don't understand the first one, why would we want that? Wouldn't it be enough to make it possible to move accounts similar to how mastodon does it (but including your local content)?

My bigger problem is that if a instance goes down then the community is gone. I like how Matrix has solved it that you can have aliases and the content gets replicated on other servers, etc. Then even if people defederate then you still have your old copy and people can keep using it.

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