Firstly, there is the unstoppable flood of new posts that are added while browsing "All". Although this doesn't happen when using the Jerbea app, it sometimes renders "All" unusable in the browser.

This will be resolved once websockets are removed with the next update:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3008

Secondly, the issue of the same posts being displayed for days under "Hot". There is already a pull request for this, so it has been fixed and just needs to be implemented:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076

Now, the only remaining points for me are:

Links to external instances should automatically be transformed when opened so that one can participate with the account of their own instance. For example, lemmy.world/c/memes should automatically become feddit.de/c/[email protected].
Communities from different instances should be able to merge, allowing users to see the content of all communities across different instances.

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[–] funkyb 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

I posted this in Ask Lemmy but since it didn't get traction I'm gonna piggyback on the visibility of this thread:

As i learn my way around ActivityPub based services, what stands out to me the most is federation is very much exposed to the users. (That, or I still just haven’t wrapped my head around the architecture details and how they manifest in terms of user experience.)

Am I just misunderstanding this, or would the end-user experience be more fluid and functional if the federation mechanics were mostly ‘under the hood’. What I mean by that is - right now if there’s a community I would enjoy participating in that is located on a different instance, in order to do that I need to (a) know it exists in the first place, (b) know what instance it is on, and (c) explicitly tell my instance about its address in order to join.

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index? And if something like that existed, couldn’t that push what is an inherently more technical detail to lower levels of the implementation, and make for a simpler UX by allowing every instance to expose a more complete list of communities to users from directly within whatever instance they choose to use?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It may make things simpler for the user, but at the cost of storage and performance of every instance in the index, which won't scale well as more instances are added over time. I personally think it's better the way it is. As long as you are educated enough to know how to federate with other instances you choose to federate with, you can keep your own instance minimally connected to only the instances and communities you actually care about.

Maybe a good compromise would be for such an idea as a globally replicated index, to be optional, so individual instances could keep it disabled if they wanted to. If you choose to enable it as an instance owner, the pain points for your end users go away, at the cost of performance and other potentially negative side-effects. If you choose to keep it disabled, you can still federate with any instances you want, but you won't participate in the index. Or maybe your instance would be listed and replicated to other instances' indexes, but your own instance won't receive updates as the global index continues to grow. Since it would just be for convenient discoverability, there's not really any problem with that. No functionality would be lost for your or any other instance.

I think for a platform like this, in any case, a little bit of extra user education goes a long way. We shouldn't be too afraid of expecting end users to educate themselves a bit, and we shouldn't be too eager to hold their hands every step of the way. It makes for more adept end users and a healthier overall community, in my opinion. It's like encouraging movie lovers to get off the couch and exercise once in a while.

[–] funkyb 3 points 1 year ago

I’d think the cost to storage and performance would be trivially small, not even a rounding error relative to the over server/host loads associated with an instance.

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