this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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Registration and discovery needs to be simplified tremendously for long term viability. But it’s a good start.
From the outside looking in, the whole model seemed needlessly complicated. So it’s like there’s a LOT of reddit.coms over here? But they’re all the same? But also different? What’s the difference? Which one do I sign up on?
But then I get here and realized it doesn’t really matter that much, since you can more or less use all of them regardless of which one you sign up for.
Something about the way users try to communicate what Lemmy/Fediverse IS, is the complicated part. It’s like everyone wants to jump straight to the more technical details behind how the model works; which probably scares off a lot of the people who just want a place to pop in and talk about their hobbies.
I just told my fairly tech-unsavvy partner the email analogy:
You sign up on Google, I sign up on yahoo, my bro-in-law runs his own from a server in his house. We can all email each other and the email looks mostly the same no matter who reads it, but yahoo isn't Google isn't my bro-in-law. Lemmy = email in general, yahoo = lemmy.ml, Google = lemmy.world, etc.
She immediately got it and has an account on some instance and has subscribed to a bunch of places.
Yep, it's email but with a nice interface and open 'threads' which we can post on.
When can we get an emacs client for lemmy?
This is probably my favorite analogy for it so far, at least as a high level overview. I kind of made the same connection myself and that’s when it clicked for me.
This is a great way to think about it! Thank you. I'll be using this to help explain it to my friends
The email analogy has got to be the best way to describe the fediverse that I've seen so far.
Yeah, this scared me off for weeks because I didn't want the hassle. Turns out it's way easier than those dorks were making it seem!
Exactly. People last week were adamant about needing to spread out new users across different instances. I understand the rationale, but let's be honest, casual newcomers don't really pay much attention to that. They just want to see a website a lot of content before signing up.
Did we not learn from mastodon? The federation concept should be introduced a bit later after they're comfortable.
yeah the people running this show need to understand that normies dont care about server hosting. they just want a feed with cat pics
Everyone wants a feed with cat pics.
Yeah, there should be simple "how and where do I sign up and find my favourite communities". I feel like there is lots of tech talk here because lots of tech stuff needs to happen before these sites are ready for the full moderation suit and for supporting the most basic aspects of Reddit communities (like flairs)...
Yeah I think it might be better to explain it like if anyone could boot up their own reddit and link to other people’s reddits. Some are popular, some aren’t, some don’t want to be huge because they want to be niche like some subreddits did. We may have subreddits with the same name but it’s ok because people can tell based on which Reddit it’s on. Also they’re called instances not reddits and communities not subreddits.
The thing that’s weird to me is that say I like football (soccer). I’m sure there are dozens of “instances” have a soccer community, but which one should I follow? It seems like this architecture fragments the user base too much.
Agreed. I feel like the apps in development are trying to make the signup process a bit easier though, so we’ll see how that goes.
Which apps? In many of them I didn't even see a way to register.
I’m currently using the beta for Memmy on iOS. I think it’s prepping for an App Store release today. It’s a good foundation and has promise.
Is it available for download?
Here it is on TestFlight for the beta - https://testflight.apple.com/join/6jaRU6rD
I do believe I got an alert today that it’s prepping for an App Store release later in the day.
Question; cuz I’ve been using Memmy too, and I haven’t had a chance to read into it much. I don’t have the ability to upvote/downvote/reply to individual comments in the app. I’m not sure if it’s a bug on my end or if he just hasn’t had a chance to implement those features yet. Do you have that same issue with it?
I had that issue occasionally. Killing the app and restarting fixed it.
Interesting. I’ve been having that issue non stop. I may try to send in a bug report or something tonight.
I'd also caution that right now is probably a very unique time for the Lemmy world.
if you're in iphone, go to wefwef.app with safari and save it as an app, it's infinitely better than default
Memmy for iOS has an onboarding screen starting with ‘do you know how fediverse works’
Most of the devs that worked on 3rd party reddit apps are remodeling to support lemmy. So we are about to get some really good quality apps in the next 4 to 6 weeks.
Is there a list or overview of these hopefully coming apps? I am using Liftoff right now but it’s en beta and lacks a lot compared to Apollo. Would like to test these out when they are coming. Until then I’ll just use Liftoff and suggest features for them to add.
Yep there is a list: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
https://sh.itjust.works/post/564648
I keep seeing people say this but honestly registering is really easy. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to create an account after leaving reddit
Well, sure, anyone posting here at the moment figured it out. But I’d bet there’s tons of people interested but intimidated.
You literally click the sign up button, fill out the form, get an email saying your application was accepted and then log in. What is complicated about that?
Genuine question.
The complication comes from things aside from the sign-up process. It’s understanding instances and navigation. People don’t know how it works. I.e. what is the equivalent of a subreddit? Who hosts it? Is it someone’s personal server? What if it goes down suddenly? Etc.
But that's not an issue with the sign up process, so why are people complaining that it is difficult and complicated to sign up?
I agree there definitely should be somewhere that shows an infographic of how the fediverse works. I've seen this one that can be handy for people to understand.
This is great. This is what should be on page to choose an instance . A no nonsense guide that people can just read and get the concepts. I think content such as this is the way to go. People don't know or care why it is better in most cases but this gives them the gist in a minute.
I had heard about it for a week, but finally signed up when a mod I trusted on a reddit sub I used posted a sign-up link to lemmy.world. I'm somewhat tech proficient, but that extra step of figuring out a good instance to join was enough to stop me for a while. I didn't want to join a dud and have yet another dead login somewhere. YMMV, of course!
I keep seeing this said about lemmy but kbin was identical to any other site. So I looked up what the process is for lemmy and, aside from like 2 glitches to look out for it was exactly the same.
Please tell me what is difficult.
My issue was I didn't know where to go to sign up. It took me a little time to understand the fediverse, then I had to figure out what instance I should sign up for. After that I started hearing some instances weren't accepting new accounts but didn't know if that was a thing everywhere or only one instance. I consider myself above average compared to the general public when it comes to my capabilities with the Internet and computer tech in general, it's never taken me days to understand stand how to sign up for a website like this before.
It does seem simple now that I'm here and understand things better. It's just a learning curve; this is unique to any website\forum\whatever I've played with before.
You have to consider that your technical proficiency is not the same as everyone else’s.
I think you're right insofar as onboarding is concerned. Once you've registered, though, Lemmy is relatively straightforward to use. Changing your user settings to display posts from ALL federated Lemmy instances on your front page helps with discoverability. That should be the default setting, but it isn't. That setting is associated with the "Type" parameter (found just below "Theme"). It isn't terribly obvious.
Agreed. The difficulty is in the initial discovery step. Early lemmy adopters will often refuse to recommend a specific instance to newcomers. But that confuses people. I know it confused the hell out of me.