I think "server" is basic and simple. I'm using that one.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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I have a slight preference for server but I've been using both terms frequently and interchangeably. Whenever I start talking about this server and that instance, I often end up using the term several times in rapid succession. As all good writers know, widening ones vocabulary in such situations helps give the text a better flow. It's good to have multiple terms for any given concept to avoid excessive repetition when trying to explain things.
I don't think it's about the term, "server" and "instance" both make sense to me. The issue is that the fediverse itself is pretty confusing.
The basics? Great: it's vaguely "IRC but persistent", all good.
But for starters it's hard to keep track of which instances actually exist - new ones pop up and old ones die at the drop of a hat.
Then there's differences in feature sets (lemmy vs kbin and whatever else) that happen to be ActivityPub compliant or whatever. kbin notably doesn't federate downvotes, for example. And all this software is still relatively immature.
Then there's the actual "who federates/defederates whom and why" debacle. This results in a lot of obvious and some less obvious visibility issues.
Then there's (other) individual instance politics.
Then there's the "meta" about all of this, which is getting confusing.
A couple of these will have parallels on e.g. Reddit - I assume this is the natural comparison to make and will keep being so for a while - like sub drama and the relationship between subs. But because the FV has this at the instance level, (and each instance has many "subs",) it's a whole level up in complexity.
Then there's how all of this makes for a pretty un-reddit-like experience - and Reddit is not the king of polish, either. While Reddit has duplicate subs, it doesn't have a design that almost automatically causes them to be created and distributed, across instances without actually correlating them afterwards. The end result is that subbing or blocking any one community will likely involve doing that manually on several instances, which is stupidly inconvenient. Also discoverability is much trickier which is worsened by the low activity.
My point is: call it what you want, but a) I don't think that's where the confusion is coming from - that's just the fediverse being confusing (and outright clunky in many regards), and b) obligatory XKCD "Standards".
I don’t think it’s about the term, “server” and “instance” both make sense to me. The issue is that the fediverse itself is pretty confusing.
Personally, I've been using the words "site" or "website", because I think highlighting the fact that each instance is its own independent website clarifies the issue to a large degree.
But you're 100% right. It just doesn't alleviate the sense of overwhelm people feel. And I don't know that anything really will, except for repeated and continued exposure, because networks of quasi-independent actors are complicated things, and the world is now full of people who have experienced the internet as little more than 5 insulated websites. The mental model that people have for social media is just "everyone's reliably using the same website as me". The idea that different social media websites are communicating with each other, and also that those social media websites don't have a billion accounts -- and don't need a billion accounts in order to be viable -- is just... alien. To the point where even those of us who are engaging in the experiment kind of sweep the essence of the space under the rug, you know? Everyone treats "Mastodon" as a singular location. This here is "Lemmy". "kbin" is over there, at a particular URL. If we treated the rest of the internet with this level of abstraction, I'd have to tell you that I was "On Firefox" right now, or telling my wife about this meme I saw "On macOS", or "at my desk".
And like, sure, some of us have a deeper internal understanding of federated social media. We heavily used IRC in the past, or get grok how email works, or whatever, but the fact that we still all kind of collectively brush aside the heterogeneous and quasi-independent nature of the network when actually using it in practice I think speaks to just how heady it all really is. And I'm not sure there's a linguistic solution to it. It's just an incredibly messy space in a world where people crave simplicity.
Personally, I’ve been using the words “site” or “website”, because I think highlighting the fact that each instance is its own independent website clarifies the issue to a large degree.
But that goes against the original point of the fediverse IMO, which was to make a resilient social media platform where it doesn't really matter what instance you join, you'll get the same content. If we treat them as separate sites, then we should probably remove the federation entirely and just have duplicates of communities at each instance and just handle things on the frontend with links.
So I think it failed at its original goal, and now it's some weird mix of separate sites and a large, decentralized ecosystem. People aren't sure if there should be separate, smaller communities or larger communities organized by instance, and we end up with a weird mix of the two (multiple, large-ish communities targeting a similar goal).
I'm not here because I think the model is the right direction, I'm here because it's better (for my priorities) than available alternatives. What I want is decentralized Reddit (i.e. one namespace for all communities, but not hosted in one location), but my options are centralized or federated services. I want the complexity abstracted from me, not in my face like it is here on Lemmy.
But that goes against the original point of the fediverse IMO, which was to make a resilient social media platform where it doesn’t really matter what instance you join, you’ll get the same content.
If that was truly the original point of the Fediverse, it failed at the design phase. The way content is hosted and passed around has meant it was always going to be a constellation of independent nodes, each doing their own things. There's nothing in the fundamental design of how these networks work that points to them being a networked simulation of centralized social media. And the repeated attempts to make it work, or at least look like it works, that way has resulted in exactly what should expected from trying to jam that square peg into this round hole: A poor and messy simulacra of centralized social media.
It has always been -- and this is necessary by design -- a weekly interconnected network of social media and networking sites. That's the true, fundamental nature of the space, based on the engine powering it. Trying to pretend otherwise is just adding complexity on top of it, not removing it.
Maybe I'm misremembering the original "marketing" about it, but at least Lemmy has this to say:
You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server/instance.
That's a lie, you can only access content that is federated with you, and there's a complex set of relationships between instances where you will always be missing some portion of the fediverse (i.e. if C blocks A, and C posts to B, users from A don't see that content on B, but users from B do).
So I'm not sure if it was siloed by design, but Lemmy was designed to replace Reddit, so presumably the same notion of what Reddit means (people congregate into communities, instead of instances) is implied:
Nutomic and I originally made Lemmy to fill the role as a federated alternative to Reddit, but as it grows, it has the potential become a main source of news and discussion, existing outside of the US’s jurisdictional domain and control.
But I obviously can't say for certain whether the original intention was to make tons of Reddit alternatives that all kind of connect to eachother, or to make a centralized Reddit alternative that is decentralized to prevent any one node disappearing from wrecking the network. If the former, I don't really understand the point, and if the latter, I think it's the wrong architecture.
Regardless, it's better than Reddit, so I stick around. I assume the same is true for Mastodon and Facebook.
I mean, I wasn't here a decadeo ago or so when the groundwork of the Fediverse was being laid, so I don't know how it was originally "marketed", but people make things without understanding the true implications of their decisions all of the time. And the current crop of leading products in the fediverse are a generation or three removed from the original designers.
People build on top of stuff with goals that are off-target of the original goals of tech. Building a bunch of square pegs and ramming them through round holes just, ultimately, results in those pegs either not slipping through, or having their corners cut off.
Yup, that's the way FOSS goes. Build what interests you, and make mistakes along the way.
Eventually the community seems to arrive at a decent solution though.
I'm really interested in working on a project that makes a proper decentralized Reddit/Twitter.
Have you heard of Lime Reader?
I don't really know the specifics but it's a different approach to decentralized reddit but it kind of came too late to get exodus traction.
Do you know how it works under the hood? I didn't see an obvious git repo in the few minutes I looked around.
I actually just started hacking on my own because I noticed a library I want to use (Iroh) finally has a release with decent documentation and a relevant example. The main idea is that each app install would help host the data, support searches, etc, so there's no single point of failure, or any real requirement for people to host larger instances (maybe just some relay hosting).
I'm guessing there are several floating around, but I figured I might as well try my own to at least get familiar with the library.
I'm afraid I don't. If you don't mind venturing to reddit the creator is fairly active on /r/redditalternatives.
"Server" has sadly been misappropriated by Discord to mean something like group, and a younger generation grew up on that and would be even more confused by that than "instance" (as seen by countless attempts to explain "server" in a federated chat context).
it’s kinda vaguely similar though… a fediverse instance is moderated by the instance admins, just like a discord server (though discord has a level of admin above server mod/admin i’m not sure that distinction matters for the general user)
The Discord use of the term is more similar to a community on Lemmy, which also has its own moderators.
This is how I see it:
- Discord server = Lemmy instance
- Discord channel = Lemmy community
- Discord thread = Lemmy post
- Discord replies = Lemmy comment threads
It's not a perfect comparison, but that's at least how I see it.
It's arguably used wrongly on Discord, but not in a way that's radically different from how I already thought about "servers" in the sense of "something you connect to".
It seems more like a term they picked because it has that familiar sense. Otherwise I think there's a semi-official term, "guild", too.
It may have been inspired by earlier chat systems where a server served a similar purpose?
Right. Discord is IRC-like, but all of the "servers" are just a logical separation within Discord.
Thanks I never understood what a server was in discord...
For me:
- Instance = MMO bosses. Part of the server, but doing your own thing, seperate from the rest of the server.
- Server = a large number of people that can interact and talk with each other.
But also me:
- Server/Instance = An individual connection point to the whole (Lemmy in this case), with it's own rules/policies, but can interact with the whole unless they become unstable/spammy, at which point they are removed (Lemmy = defederated).
- Lemmy = The IRC network. You can have netsplits (different instances coming and going that effect each other), but they all talk the same language and really for the most part doesn't matter what server your on.
Discord = I do not understand. It's like if you mashed IM and IRC together, but broken, and doing nothing well. Why anyone uses it is perplexing.
Hey, everyone! Get in here! We're building a bikeshed!
The word instance is fine, and makes sense if you think about it for five seconds.
Asking potential new users to think for 5 seconds is sometimes a tall order lol
And an excellent filter.
provider maybe?
"Provider" is the best alternative to "instance" I've seen. I'm down with provider.
Service provider? "Please select your Lemmy service provider".
that actually sounds like a good way to call them
Rewording it doesn't really help.
Old adage...People don't want choices, they want what they want.
Every time you ask a question you lose a chunk of your audience. With something like lemmy, they want to look at messages and respond. Let them do that. Encourage them to choose an instance later, when they're equipped to make that choice.
Yes that's a hard problem with federation.. mastodon went for a default instance as a solution. There are likely better ones but that's a problem lots of people are working on.
mastodon can do default instances because they have the account migration process… i totally agree this is a great solution: get people in with sane defaults, and then let people move once they know how it works
there will be plenty of people that don’t move (or maybe that’s solvable too: analyse your toots and suggest a more niche instance after 2mo?) but i’m not sure that’s a huge problem if your “default instance” is more of a random choice from a list of sane defaults
you're right about people making choices, but I still think the word choice matters, I've told people about Lemmy before and they always ask what an instance is
What you describe is catering to the marginal user: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user
Luckily the Fediverse doesn't have to grow at all costs and can aim for more long term goals.
yes and no… we don’t have revenue goals, but we have goals for the fediverse and we have the social media critical mass problem: you have to hit a critical mass before you become indispensable… if people try the fediverse and there’s not enough content, they tend to just leave rather than stick with it
My vote goes to server, though with a little explanation as to why everyone calls them instances.
Easier onboarding, but still nudging users to understand how it all works.
Does that make sense? I don't really know how to articulate the idea properly
I'm not so sure about changing the terminology, but if we did, I think it should be a word that implies what the situation is: That the instance they pick isn't a walled garden in itself, but just an access point to the wider connected Lemmyverse. I think that was a common confusion point for most of us when we first heard of Lemmy.
So... "access point"? Or "gateway"? Or for a milder change, going from "instance" to "default instance" might get the point across.
if we wanted to keep the word instance then yea "default instance" isn't bad, or maybe "home instance"
"Home instance" is the terminology I use.
Matrix use the term of "homeserver" too
Server
Portal
Host
Those would be my suggestions.
I'm not a fan of "portal" since that implies that there isn't much difference in which one you pick. For example, it doesn't really matter which Matrix server I create my account on, I'll have access to the same content.
A Lemmy instance is quite important to the experience since admins can hide certain types of content (word filters, instance blocking, etc), have different rules, etc.
When I think of "portal," I think of something like an ISP, web browser, messaging client, etc. They all connect to the same place, and outside of a few cosmetic differences, they essentially do the same thing.
Call servers "Lemmy Service Providers" and people might make the connection with what ISPs do.