this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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That's cool!
I'm also a big fan of what Bridgy Fed is capable of doing towards Bluesky - it does show that there is a lot one can actually do with the protocol.
As I read the situation it's complicated. They are not inherently evil—on the contrary, I think they are trying to do good—but they are locked down by the structural chains around them. The whole thing was initiated by Jack Dorsey, and from the onset they wanted to re-create Twitter while solving what they perceived as "moderation challenges", and with the starting point that they were to create the next Twitter, not a decentralized network of services.
Hell, wasn't the original idea that Twitter itself would become part of the network?
When I see Bluesky today I see Twitter 15+ years ago. A lot of optimism and goodwill, but nevertheless a project that is doomed from the start.
I actually view it the opposite. Lemmy isn't necessarily doomed from the start but we will not reach mass adoption because we are too clunky to use for most users because of its distributed nature.
Bluesky has enabled tons of non tech users to immediately reap the rewards without having to worry about instances or who can see their posts, while maintaining decentralization (albeit with a high cost).
The true path forward will probably be a world like Bluesky but instead of running your own relay, you're contributing compute power to a Kubernetes cluster. Instances and having to worry about federation is far too clunky for most users, it's the reason mastodon never saw mass adoption while Bluesky almost immediately did.
I don't think usability problems in Lemmy are related to the protocol. For me open source alternatives carry the promise that they will only get better, while profit-oriented alternatives will eventually have to get worse.
I don't think any of what makes Lemmy difficult to use is a necessity based on its distributed nature; its a result of the developers being more geared towards the back-end than towards the front-end. Which is not an inherent weakness - the back-end needs to be good before a nice front-end can make sense. So I'm optimistic. :)
Exactly. If I want to subscribe to a group (sublemmy?) that isn't on my home instance, then I have to search for it from my home instance and then click the "Subscribe" button. This is a somewhat painstaking process, but there's no reason that I can see why that couldn't be streamlined.