Asklemmy

43943 readers

815 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Am I the only one who can’t get used to Fediverse? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by s1vgm to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I'd like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:

I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
The content and style of each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances with lengthy domains.
Fediverse isn't truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.

These reasons prompted me to explore more decentralized networks, I mean truly decentralized networks, such as Nostr.

However, creating a Nostr account and saving the Recovery Phrases is challenging (I lost my first Nostr account due to the loss of Recovery Phrases). And generally speaking, the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.

I believe people should leave Twitter due to shadowbans and robots and Facebook due to privacy concerns, but I'm struggling to choose a platform to migrate to. Each has its drawbacks, making it difficult to decide.

I'd love to hear your opinions on this.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If everyone joined the largest instance, then the decentralized aspect would become kinda moot. That would give lots of power to the owner of that instance, almost like on centralized social media.

[–] Carighan 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course, but for the user, there's signifcant upsides to doing that unless the underlying system can essentially make the barriers between instances invisible.

Now of course this is a Lemmy-specific thing. Reddit benefitted massively from stumbling into amazing commuities and discussions, and hence sitting in the largest pool is quite useful.

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

I'd agree. Having one large instance isn't necessarily bad. Yes, it gives the admins quite some power, but they're obviously doing something right there. And the federated aspect is still baked into the software and present. Once they act out, all the content is replicated everywhere else and people can just switch to another instance. This isn't the same like a centralized platform. Even if people mainly use one instance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

My advice is to join a cental hub in the network if you're interested in a very broad range of content, and a specialized hub if you have more particular interests. The relationship between for example lemmy.world and startrek.website is a great example.

I think a lot of the perceived complexity of the fediverse is that it's not just a social network, but a network of social networks. You'd want to start out on a node that reflects your interests; if that interest is merely "more content", make it a central one.

If you want to be on a tiny or self hosted Mastodon instance it might even make sense to build the base of your network on a central network hub first, and then migrate when you already have rooted yourself in the network.