this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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I think a barrier to wide-spread adoption of lemmy is that for a regular joe, the instance system is a bit confusing. I'm seeing a lot of people comparing the instances to email servers, but I think something they're missing is that there are a few large email providers which most people default to (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) and a bunch of smaller ones which people go to if they disagree with the policies of the larger ones (e.g. protonmail)
I think that if lemmy is to replace reddit as the most widely-used link aggregator, we need some kind of default server which is large enough that people feel comfortable with settling in on. That way user base growth isn't hindered by confusion. If they later decide that a smaller instance suits their needs better (whether that be the moderation practices or site reliability), they can uproot and move their account there.
I do agree with that. This is definitely a barrier of entry. But you can't really completely get rid of it without taking away what makes lemmy what it is: A federated network and it's integral to what it is trying to acheive.
What I do believe you can do is mitigate it. "Default servers" could be part of that. Again I can only advocate for regional servers. In the bigger countries you can make that based on a 1 default server per state or region/province level. In smaller countries even one instance per country might be enough. People would automatically be on an instance that is uses their native language. You could also kinda slowly introduce them to the idea of federation like that: "This is the instance for your country. But you can also explore other countries and interact with their people".
Somebody could create a landing page to automatically pick an instance for a user based on what language their system is set to and their IP adress. A German user goes to the website and gets to pick the state they live in. They are getting suggested a server that correlates to whatever state they picked.
Obviously for now it would be overkill to create an instance for every single state. But hopefully we will get there.
Right now the recommended instances on join-lemmy.org are actually based on your system language, so we're halfway there.
oh that's great
To be honest I feel like even that’s too complicated. Most people don’t really care about the great technology behind the product; they just want a product that works. That’s in part why the current large social media networks are so large; registration is so easy. The moment you add friction in the form of learning how federation works, normal users will become jaded and just decide not to join the network. If the goal right now is to improve the network effect offered by lemmy, we need to do as much as possible to minimize the amount of people we turn away.
This isn’t to say that we should focus completely on the “default instances”. I agree that ultimately the goal should be to have people move to smaller instances which take advantage of more of lemmy’s wider philosophy. But I think that the first step should be to introduce people to the concept of the fediverse, and then have them interact with it as intended.
I think that with the growing popularity of Lemmy and kbin the registration process will naturally become more intuitive over time. Especially on the short term I expect a lot of tweaking to happen.
Im honestly not so sure about the “more intuitive over time” part. I feel like a lot of people who are using lemmy currently are already pretty technically inclined, and they’re already mildly confused as to how accounts work. If that’s the case, imagine how a normal person feels. I don’t think we can rely on things getting smoothed out over time if we’re to maximize the short-term intake of users caused by the reddit exodus.
In regards to email; the reason people use one of the large providers is that the large providers have taken malicious and aggressive steps to break the ability of smaller providers to talk to them, in the name of "security".
It's not a 'natural state of being' : up until relatively recently you could easily run your own email server (and most businesses and huge numbers of people actually did), but it's been co-opted and broken very thoroughly by Google and Microsoft to their benefit.
With the Fediverse, you probably don't actually want giant servers, as you're just repeating the concentration of users and thus power in the network into a smaller, fewer set of hands.
I'm of the opinion that it's ok and natural for a few larger servers to emerge. The reason why I think it's natural is because normal people frankly don't care about the nuanced benefits about finding an instance that caters to their exact moderation preferences or philosophical pontifications about why Big Tech is bad. They just want to click on funny images, upvote them, and maybe comment once in a while.
I think that's ok since I believe the ultimate goal of social media sites is to serve content for users' consumption in a non-abusive way. The reason why I believe the fediverse is probably better than traditional social media is because it gives the power of choice. That power doesn't need to be executed, but because it's baked into the platform the users always have the ability to exercise it. If a large instance decides to screw over its users, then the users can simply move to another instance and still have full access to the network's content. That power alone is what makes me ok with having few large instances.
I think the differing view here is 'natural growth' vs 'forced growth'.
I don't think large servers that come by being large because they're the preferred choice for a given community, topic, reliability, or whatever other criteria become valuable are bad.
I think setting it up so that a new user is told 'You go here, and you sign up on this instance.' and writing all the onboarding stuff to direct them to the mega-instance for the sake of convenience because we can't figure out how to make it simpler or more clear or explain how federation works isn't the right path.
I will admit I do not have a fantastic answer on how to explain to someone who has limited technical knowledge exactly WHY federation is the way to go for communication and that the instance you should pick relies almost exclusively on the reliability of the service (is it fast? does it stay running? is it going to exist in six months?) and the trustworthiness of the admin (are they someone who you can deal with in terms of moderation? do you trust they're not going to use their access to violate any trusts or behave in a way contrary to your beliefs?).
I'm old enough that my first foray into 'federated' content was Fidonet, and which BBS you called 'home' and posted from was almost exclusively a decision based on the local BBS community and the sysop because the messages and software were otherwise exactly the same from BBS to BBS.
So, my bias is that large instances can't be close communities and that larger instances require different and more aggressive and impersonal moderation and the bigger you get the more true both become.
This is just a false statement; I can email my friends on GMail just fine from my Protonmail account. I think you’re meaning to characterize malicious methods to keep people on the platform, but that issue is orthogonal to getting people registered.
The issue Lemmy has right now is getting normal people registered.
Protonmail is one of the larger providers of email at this point.
If you were to set up your own SMTP server and try to deliver mail, you essentially cannot reliably email any of the larger providers, because they've taken steps to mitigate spam and issues which also makes it impossible to handle your own email anymore, even if the intent wasn't explicitly to break self-hosting.
If you concentrate everyone into larger providers, you're allowing them the ability to gatekeep who can and cannot talk to their users, and most people will either not understand this, or be happy to allow it.
I will admit to some bias in not trusting there to be a 'central' server that's run and maintained with the good of the community in mind because there are endless, endless examples of situations where the owners/maintainers of a service have decided to take actions that are fundamentally against their users best interests - which, of course, is probably why anyone is actually here discussing this in the first place.
Could onboarding be improved? Absolutely. But I really don't think the solution is to have a small handful of blessed instances and try to push everyone to them.
But this isn't true either? I can easily spin up a SMTP server on a homelab, create an MX record, and email my friends with Gmail accounts as if I was emailing from my Protonmail or Gmail account.
I appreciate you acknowledging your bias against central providers, but to be honest I think it's leading to some incorrect conclusions. This discussion is also kind of getting derailed, but I'd be happy to continue debating about it.
Interesting; my general experience (and that of customers I spent time working with doing support for various cloud providers) was that you could, theoretically do so, but 'sending the email to a provider' and 'the provider accepts it and delivers it' were not always the same thing.
Microsoft was especially bad in that it would accept the message, and give you the standard SMTP 'message accepted' response but then silently just drop it in the backend, never to be seen again. Didn't go to spam, didn't land in a filter just... vanished.
Google, at least, had the decency to tell you when it was going to reject your email, but still.
It was always the same dance: you need a PTR, an SPF record, DKIM, etc. but at the end of the day, Google and Microsoft absolutely gatekeep what gets delivered to their platform, so if it's critical that your email shows up reliably every time, you have to move into the "ecosystem" of ESPs and all the hoops that are involved there if you want your message to go to the 'big providers'.