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Could federation be a turn-off for more 'mainstream' users? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

144 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey everyone, I'm honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that's because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it's safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I'd been a Reddit user since 2010 so I've witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel--less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.

That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There's other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a 'chatroom' versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, 'visit site--post to site--view content on site'.

Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far--hope to see it grow!

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Federation should not be an issue for users, I think we could make the front-end hide most of the complexity that it brings. There are only a few things that are harder now:

discovering communities outside your own instance (this is now mostly done through a website that lists communities)
logging in when you receive a link to a post on another instance (you have to go to your own instance, login there, and search for the post again)
creating a community on another instance (this requires an account on the other instance to create the community, after that they can add you as a mod)

One of the things that could be improved is changing the login page to add least add something about Federation, so users won't try to log in on another instance with the credentials of their home instance.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your second bullet point is the one I have wanted fixed badly as soon as I started using lemmy. I want there to be a small button at the top of posts that takes me to that same post but through the server where my account is. Idk how that would work though. Maybe a browser addon that remembers where my accounts live? I wish I had the knowledge to make that sort of thing.

Sorry I deleted and reposted this comment, having an issue I'm trying to figure out.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This would require a browser extension or a central redirection server (similar to how single sign on is implemented between multiple URLs). The central server approach won't really fit well with the decentralized concept, although that server only needs to know your Lemmy instance and will only redirect users.

A browser extension could easily inject some kind of button in the page, and it would be easy enough for the browser extension to know your own Lemmy instance. I'm not sure if there is an easy URL to a specific post on a certain instance though, for example this post is https://feddit.nl/post/39577 for me and does not contain any information that this post is actually on [email protected]. Those post URLs work fine if your home instance is aware about the post, but won't work if nobody has subscribed to that community.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why a browser addon? My first approach would be to have the client do the job. Link to the page via the current instance, and ask the server to fetch it if it doesn't exist.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is about a user browsing on another Lemmy instance. For example, a user from lemmy.world receives a link on a chat app to a post on beehaw.org. Now he wants to reply to that post, to do so the user has to go to the same post on their home instance. Beehaw.org has no idea that the user has an account on lemmy.world, so they can't just redirect the user. It is very difficult for Lemmy instances to share this data, as browsers have built in protections to prevent websites from sharing common identifiers (those were used to track people over multiple websites).

A menu could be added where the user can select their instance, but that would still require Beehaw.org to know about the existence of the user's home instance. This could still give issues with smaller instances, that are not well federated with other instances.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh, I see. I was thinking of opening links within Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m not sure if there is an easy URL to a specific post on a certain instance though, for example this post is https://feddit.nl/post/39577 for me and does not contain any information that this post is actually on [email protected].

You should be able to see a very colorful button on every post and comment, this button will link to the post/comment on the instance it was sent from.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ah, thanks! That works, and you can easily search for that link in your own Reddit instance, and it will fetch it to your home server if it was not yet available. That's actually a very nice feature. I had no idea what that colourful image was, but it makes sense when you know it is the Fediverse logo.