In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:
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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.
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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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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.
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 <the instance I am using>! 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.
The problem is that Lemmy is being mentioned in hackernews reddit and elsewhere as a potential alternative. Not as an alternative with all those caveats in framing but just so.
Communicating what it is even more boldly might be useful (I know it’s been done quite a lot in long self posts but that I’m not sure how much of that goes through)
Lemmy needs two things to be successful:
and it’s already getting more and more of each of those.
It won’t get more users if it continues to be difficult to use.
people kept saying similar stuff about Mastodon, and yet, miraculously, its user base somehow keeps growing.
It is a lot easier to attract users if you do not have to make an account on many different instances
Good thing you don’t have to do that then!
You don’t need to make accounts on many instances.
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.
1- You mean something along the lines of Hubzilla’s nomadic identities? or how?
2- This is a good Idea. But I’m not sure how posible it is as of now
I’m not familiar with Hubzilla, but it sounds like one possible solution!
I’ve never used Hubzilla or its cousin project friendica. But I know nomadic identity is a unique feature of the former.
For what I’ve read, it allows you to keep your friends and content that are also hosted on hubzilla, but any person from another platform you follow would be lost (you’ll have to re-follow) if you move instances through nomadic identity.
Putting a hypothetical lemmy nomadic identity as an example, If you move from a lemmy intance to another using clones, any community you subscribe to that’s based on lemmy will remain, but any kbin magazine you subscribe to would have to be re-subscribed
Wow me neither, looks promising!
NFTs
Eh?
It’s a joke. You could have your account tied to an NFT. Then transfer it to another instance if you want.
Just to add a little more context, here’s the W3C recommendation for DID:
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
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.
Yes, I think there are other alternatives to accomplish a similar goal. It may be that lemmy will build in its own syncing of some kind. The method doesn’t really matter much to me.
Lemmy needs me to be able to login…Let’s start with the basics.
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
I think #1 is a great idea, but it would take a lot of work and would probably be a pain to phase-in and phase-out across all platforms, but I do think it’s a good idea, at least to offer as an option. While I am loathe to mention anything cryptocurrency and NFT-related, creating a simplified distributed ledger and smart contract system that would propagate through federated communities seems like an interesting idea. Alternatively, creating a way for users to specify their other usernames on other servers in a small bio in a profile page could be a possible compromise.
Your point #2 also sounds great, but I don’t think this should be allowed between communities on defederated instances, because there’s laws in many countries that can classify the act of hosting/providing certain content to be criminal. Therefore, if say if server_a resides in country_a, and country_a allows piracy, and server_b in country_b, and country_b considers it a criminal act to propagate certain information about piracy, the server_a/piracy and server_b/piracy might have different restrictions to discuss piracy. However, a less-informed mod may attempt to federate server_a/piracy and server_b/piracy, and insodoing accidentally make the owner/host of server_a unknowingly complicit in a criminal act.
I’m not a lawyer, and of course this is not intended to be legal advice, but I think that the effort would better be spent on implementing a solution to the decentralized identity problem, than the de-fragmentation of similar communities.
One other nugget to consider, assuming we were to replace Reddit, and the sum of the users on the fediverse were to achieve similar numbers to Reddit’s glory days–we would definitely be scraped for AI training data. By keeping the communities fractured, that makes it far more difficult for a company to easily scrape all the information needed. While it might be trivial right now, in the ideally decentralized structure that the fediverse would take, it would take a lot more requests for a server to chase out every strand on every network.
Perhaps in this sense, it might be wise for instances to allow specific community defederation(ie, where server_a and server_b are federated, but server_a does not allow server_b/piracy to propagate(this may already be possible, IDK), but I do not think it would be wise to allow community to community federation.
TL;DR: #1 is a great idea, OP, and it could be implemented in a simplified distributed ledger that propagates through federated communities, and uses a simplified smart-contract–or the problem could be solved by a compromise that allows users to specify their usernames for other instances in a small public bio. Addressing #2, this could cause legal problems in specific scenarios, rather it is more important for any instance to be able to disallow the propagation of specific communities from a federated server (if this isn’t already possible).
@DaughterOfMars
For #1 - ive thought about that.
My thought would be something like a small LDAP type server. Self-hostable. You make a user like myuser@mydomain.net and its honored as a log in for the various fediverse stuff.
So like it could hold the subsciptions for the communities on the various threadiverse servers you connect to localy, and when you open say lemmy.ml, part of the info sent for your user would be a list of communities you are subscibed to on lemmy.ml.
If it just handles the user auth, then it could also be a user auth for other fedivers stuff too. PixelFed, and Mastodon, etc. Each service could have its own sub section of the user object’s info.
You would still probably end up with a “home” instance you would use, but if that home instance becomes untenable, or goes away, then you would just pick a new instance and log in there with your myuser@mydomain.net account.
Im not a good enough dev to code it, but thats my idea anyway.
You can kind of do something like this already. You are able to host a small instance of your preferred fediverse software and create an account on it. I don’t know if I really like the approach or not, but it’s something I’ve thought about recently.
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.
I understand that you don’t. But some of us do not mind these things and/or want them. Perhaps there is a compromise (e.g. an optional global ID if you opt in to the system)
I feel the same way - totally understand why some people wouldn’t, but I definitely would appreciate the utility. Looking at the way someone interacts with others is often a consideration when I’m deciding whether to engage with them myself.
Friendica, I believe, federates their groups. You can see them from mastodon as a user. I guess in AP vocabulary they are an actor. You can post to the group from mastodon too.
However let me just bring into mind that we recently defederated from some Lemmy instances and for which reasons we did that (as beehaw I mean).
Well, #1 is kind of impossible now. Different people can have the same ID on different instances.
#2, unless they really want to just be their own separate community completely, like an entirely different website, then yeah of course. That’s the point. Regarding the current major defederation, my understanding is that this not meant to be permanent and is a different situation. It’s a workaround basically.
Using DIDs would involve a completely different system. Everyone would have to create a new identity anyway.
Lateposting, but DIDs would also solve a problem I have on kbin. I have an account on a certain kbin server because I wanted to pick a smallish server. A server small enough that it isn’t a big hub and thus helps out with federation, but big enough that it’s probably not just one person’s personal server that will only ever run during the 10 minute windows where they personally want to check kbin, which probably won’t overlap with my own.
Sometimes that server goes down. So I also have an account on the biggest kbin server of them all, kbin.social, so I can still use the site and interact with it when my home server is down.
Posting this on Beehaw because I didn’t subscribe to Technology until after this post was made, and I currently have no way to force this post to show up for me on kbin.
The idea of federating communities does sound like a good idea. Now that I think of it I’m surprised that isn’t already a thing.