@Kichae@tenforward.social @Kichae@wanderingadventure.party

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Content aggregators are not forums. Just having categories doesn’t really cover it. CAs are designed so that old posts fall away quickly, so that people will keep posting new top level content and keep people emgaged in the constant scroll, much like Twitter or Facebook. They are largely unstructured, with different “categories” behaving quasi-independently from one another.

    Forums are structured spaces where the same people post stuff to the same categories, that are mostly offshoots of the forum’s core theme.

    People interact with and behave rather differently in these different contexts.


  • It’s harder to see on a large Lemmy instance like LW, but most of the fediverse is very patchwork. The network of Lemmy sites is itself very patchwork, with the MLs, Hexbear, Beehaw, NSFW, etc. all having different defederation profiles, but the whole space is an incomplete mesh. Mastodon has more themed instances than Lemmy, more very small instances than Lemmy, and a much bigger anti-capital, anti-commerce bent than Lemmy, with many more people complaining on main about other instances rules and federation policies, so if you look, you can really see it.

    But the whole fedi project is patchwork by nature.



  • So many AP platforms are made by a couple of guys in their garage, it’s not even funny, and the mentality of “just dicking around” means what gets used is whatever the whims of the day dictate, rather than the standard.

    “If it works, it’s not stupid” and all that.

    But that kind of work lacks real world testing, and depe concern for public expectaton or desire.

    Plus, you have to keep in mind that the idea of interplatform interoperability isn’t this core conceit of ActivityPub. It’s a potential use case, but it’s not an expectation. There’s no reason anyone should expect interop like that, other than some developers wanted to try it.

    But some didn’t, and now that their platforms are gaining audience, they’re refactoring to meet that audience’s expectations.


  • I always like forum setups where you had limited posting privileges until you’d had a couple of posts. Usually, they’d have an introduction category where you could post, and then comment on some other users’ posts, to get your post or reputation count high enough to unlock the rest of the board.

    Most Lemmy sites are small enough to have a local introduction community or other ‘free’ communities for newbies to dip their toes and acclimate. They’d be good places to centralize posts on how all of this works, too.

    Wouldn’t scale to large servers, though.




  • I cannot stress this strongly enough: You have not been “using Lemmy” for 1.5 years now. “Lemmy” isn’t a service the same way Reddit is, it’s a web engine, like Joomla, or like phpBB.

    You’ve been using lemm.ee for 1.5 years.

    Nobody wants to hear this, but there’s no “Lemmy”. This emergent network of social media sites isn’t a coherent thing, and it’s not a stable concept. The attempts to make this look like a singular space are to the ultimate detriment of the network, because implicitly lying to end users about what they’re doing informs how they behave.

    You’ve been using lemm.ee. Lemm.ee has copies of content on other websites, but those websites have different rules, and different expectations than lemm.ee. You don’t get to pretend otherwise because of where you’re reading the content, and there is no guarantee that you will have further access to content from any other website than lemm.ee.

    This is a reality that people simply do not want to face, for some reason. Everyone wants to imagine that federation is just centralized social media with some voodoo in the background, but it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and this is the wild fucking west.

    You’re going to get your toes stepped on if you treat it like something it’s not.



  • Yes, perhaps. But I suspect that still distracts from the fact that we’re trying to sell an illusion with the fediverse, and I personally believe that that is a mistake. So many issues people voice about their experience here come from the design of everything emulating Big Social, and Big Social is centralized.

    Aping the design language of centralized social media and then trying to get anyone other than enthusiasts on board is never going to work.

    One of the ways we do this is by referring to “Mastodon” and “Lemmy” as if they are places you can go to, websites you can use. This is why I chose phpBB as my reference point. I’ve used WordPress and Joomla in the past, with less impact. We don’t and have never spoken about phpBB as a singular location. You would respond to someone suggesting you “use phpBB” with, at the very least, a confused look. Or, if you didn’t know what it is, you’d ask them “what is that?” and they’d tell you “forum software”, revealing that their request of you was absurd. “Get an email address” is, at the very least, something that isn’t a nonsensical request. Websites demand it of us all of the time.


  • Mastodon servers are separate entities, too. The fact that they communicate with each other doesn’t change that, and the persistent desire that folks here have to imagine otherwise is a hurdle to adoption.

    The mental model is of a central space that instances grant or bar access to, but that’s simply not how the technology actually works. Too much effort has gone into trying to make ActivityPub-enabled websites look like something they’re not (centralized social media), while totally ignoring what they are: small forums and microblogs that have optional access to other forums and microblogs.

    Mastodon is web server software. “Mastodon” doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. And the fact that everyone keeps trying to sell this illusion is exactly why there are all of these broken expectations and hurdles.


  • The server selection problem goes away if people stop treating their hosting website as an after thought or dumb terminal. People really have to stop promoting web server software as if it’s a platform, and start finding reasons to recommend actual websites to people.

    Ain’t nobody ever recommended phpBB to anyone who wasn’t looking to host a forum.




  • If what you mean by centralized apps is apps having a default website, or a hard-coded website that it accesses, then that’s also going to lead to centralizing the website.

    The fediverse is just the web. It’s not really suited to an app-first model of operation. Like, imagine having a blog-viewer app that only let you read one blog. We see this kind of behaviour from the business world, and people kind of hate it.

    The only reason it would be different here is if the network collapses, and if it does, it’s going to collapse into lemmy.world.

    Which, apparently, is a “deal breaker”.




  • But it’s better from many angles that they are. Discoverability alone. Consistency of instance level rules. Theme.

    It just makes sense on some level that sports communities would be on a sports-focused website, and such a website is where people whose primary interest is in discussing sports would have their accounts. From there, they can follow other topics they’re interested in, but their primary focus is still on, I don’t know, basketball or whatever.

    Same for cars. Some of the most active forums on the internet are car ownership forums. If you could access CivicForums from IoniqForums, then it would make sense to do so. Much more sense than finding people discussing Hondas on lemmy.world and Hyundais on sh.itjust.works.

    Just because you don’t give a shit where these discussions are taking place, doesn’t mean it makes sense for people to just shit them out anywhere.


  • Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren’t intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can’t really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.

    The fact that “Lemmy” isn’t a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you “saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning” and it be a meaningful statement. You can’t substitute “Lemmy” into that sentence, though, because there isn’t a Lemmy.

    There’s a thousand Lemmys.


  • This.

    There are rough edges to the actual onboarding experience, of course, but the joinlemmy and joinmastodon and joinwahtever websites really aren’t a part of it. They’re more of an ad for admins, demonstrating that there’s an active network of sites already using the product. The fact that not even the product develoeprs seem to understand this is a real issue, though.

    Honestly, we need to stop sending people to “Lemmy” or “Mastodon” or whatever. Those are website engines. It’s like sending someone to “WordPress” when you want them to read your blog.