It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
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After email comes matrix. If you include all systems based on matrix, there are hundreds of millions of users already.
I don’t care if it catches on, I’m enjoying it here where the people are still awesome.
… but lemmy and masto do completely different things
masto’s a microblogging platform like twitter and lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit
honestly i kinda wish there were a rebuild of email that is compatible with the old system but was redesigned from the ground up to do the job better
I’m not technical enough to think it through carefully but I’ve always thought there was an opportunity for an organization like USPS to develop email 2.0 - something that gives people some kind of verifiable and secure email address so that users can easily find each other whilst filtering out spam (or to have spam taken into consideration in the design at the outset). You would design it based on strict standards that would be difficult to get around so that big tech could not easily co-opt it, and adopt for some kind of critical function (taxes, voting maybe?) so that it would encourage adoption en masse. Make it distributed so that users can selfhost it easily, safely, and securely.
Yeah man if I were in charge of the post office I’d definitely push for that AND the return of postal banking. Every post office in the United States would be your one stop service for this email so if there are authentication issues or anything you can actually go there and talk to a PERSON, IN-PERSON.
You would use this system specifically for official government correspondence, and also it’d be better for job seeking too - any situation where you need to be communicating as YOURSELF, fully verified.
I’d even throw in social media features. Forums, microblogging, live chat groups… however, everyone’s identity is clear and certain. No anonymity here. There is privacy insofar as what’s between you and the government stays between you and the government, but if you want anonymity and to express opinions without someone knowing who you are, that’s to be done elsewhere.
Instead of a social media website that lies to you and pretends dishonestly to give you privacy, this would have to be up front about the fact that it’s public property. A town square where you’re wearing a name tag. If you don’t want your neighbors knowing your rhetorical positions, post them elsewhere. Those other places, private services, and important and need to exist as counterbalance.
I’m sure many criminals would be stupid enough to use it for human trafficking and contraband smuggling shit though so that’ll help uncover and discipline rogue elements.
It does not though. I made a post the other day from the StarTrek.website instance and couldn’t figure out if nobody had upvoted or commented on it, then tried to look it up on my regular discuss.online instance where it didn’t exist, then went further to look it up on Lemmy.world (where the community is located) and saw that tens of people had. I wasn’t able to respond to any of those at first though, until it caught up on an instance where I already had an account.
And that wasn’t even the only time that very same day that I saw a post existing/not existing and/or having a different number of comments and differences in voting counts. Perhaps 0.19.6 will help with some of these issues, at least on Lemmy but then PieFed, Mbin, and eventually Sublinks are still going to have to figure things out on their own as well.
So I am glad that things are going well for you who I note is on Lemmy.world, but the rest of the Fediverse is definitely struggling, in part because rather than in spite of that centralization. Also I note that Lemmy.world federating smoothly within itself doesn’t even count in my book as “federation” at all! That’s just Reddit 2.0 with everything on a single server, with all the benefits and pitfalls which that entails.
More generally when the subject is man vs. bear, and someone chooses bear, it doesn’t help to simply laugh at those making that choice. Maybe we should listen, and maybe even expend efforts to make changes to become more welcoming for more people that would absolutely love to get off of the likes of Reddit, X, Threads, or Facebook?
That’s my 2¢ anyway.
Nobody point how much Email sucks!
I really wish email had a built-in aliases feature. Like, so you can create unlimited new addresses that just point to your normal inbox. That would help so much with spam, since you could just block individual aliases. I know some email providers have this feature, but usually it’s paid. Plus Addressing is also nice, but it does nothing to hide your “real” address. Also I’m disappointed that end-to-end encrypted email is basically never used by normal people.
It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.
There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.
People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.
Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone, or reading mail one person sent to another. You’re just sending something to an address.
Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.
The fediverse is no near that simple or intuitive.
Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.
Ah, I see. A youngling who never heard of the usenet.
Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation.
How very IRC of them.
Be a better admin. I’ll join your instance once it’s set up.
It was broken before then, the whole distributed user and instances is hard for the average non techy. This is the same issue Linux has. People say “just install Linux” but when the person Google’s it, they get destroyed with 30 plus flavors and don’t understand what to do.
This smells like ego projection. These are tools for jobs, they don’t have to compete.
What on earth are you talking about?? Of course they don’t have to compete. It’s a meme. It’s meant to be funny, not accurate. What does my ego have to do with anything?
It’s alright, it’s art. You can’t expect it to reach everyone the same way.
just imagine if we could only communicate with people using the same mail service like the newer internet.
I get the argument, but email is also very different to the kind of open-web network that the fediverse resides in. There are problems the fediverse faces which email doesn’t like discoverability. The emails either come to you or they don’t. With federated social media, you have to find the content you’re looking for first. Maybe you use a search engine, or somebody gives you a business card with their handle and instance, whatever. Then you have to figure out how to view those posts from your home instance if you want to actually interact in any way. There’s browser extensions and stuff which try to make this easier, but that’s another thing that has to be explained and set up, plus not everyone is visiting from a web browser with extension support, or a web browser at all for that matter.
It’s not fundamentally impossible to understand the fediverse, but there’s more of a barrier than email, which can be explained in a single sentence like “Your email provider gives you a unique address that anybody else can send emails to and vice versa.” I don’t think convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple is going to convince people outside the bubble that that’s true.
convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple
There’s a difference between ‘technically simple’ and ‘understandable UX’.
Your mom doesn’t need to know how ActivityPub works or the intricacies of federation. She just needs to know to log in and go to c/cutecats.
The early-adopter curse here is causing way too much technobabble to be involved in descriptions that just confuse people, and it’s technical aspects that the nerd cohort here is fascinated by, but uh, nobody else is.
The real leap will be to resist the urge to pull out the PPT and spend 3 hours and 10,000 words explaining how Lemmy works vs the much more concise how-to-use-Lemmy details that people actually want.
There’s a lot of assumptions being made by a lot of people that “normal” people are stupid and couldn’t understand ‘It’s a conversation platform like Reddit, but it’s run by it’s users and that’s why there’s a lot of servers who all talk to each other’ and so there’s a lot of hand wringing about how you have to explain all the details and such, which really, isn’t all that true.
Every non-technical person I’ve explained it to like that immediately understands what it is, how you’d use it, and what it’s used for and I’ll occasionally get a ‘Oh, neat, how does all that work?’ question I can then expand on, but that’s like, maybe 1 out of 20.
TLDR: too many details is not helpful for most people, and nerds loooooove going into more detail than anyone could possibly care about
Welcome to the Nerdiverse, where normies are kept out of.
The point being made is really just the identity of user being tied to User@domain.tld vs @handle it seems like that concept has died with Web 2.0. Only thing I would improve of the fediverse. If communities could be merged with when a group of instances agree to form a network. Like how IRC does it with channels. I mean yeah there would be netsplits from time to time but it would cut down on duplication and increase the traffic of niche communities like the benefits of central platforms get but it’s still distributed.
Well with email if you want emails to come to you you also have to search for it and sign up your email to a list to receive them or give your email to people for them to send you stuff.
In lemmy you need to go to a community finder and find communities you want then you copy their link and paste it in your home instance search bar and hit follow. With email you need to search the web for a sites email list then paste your email in their and say you want to receive their email
There is discoveribility, but no one uses it. It’s called Web of Trust (by PGP).
Link, please?
Doesn’t really have the same purpose but…
Thank you either way.
Perhaps a better analogy would be Usenet, IRC, or XMPP?
Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net kept saying that it was too hard… *head desk*
Mastodon is objectively more popular than lemmy. But comparing them to email as a whole is a bit deceptive, a better comparison would be Mastodon and Gmail, or ActivityPub and Email.
Mastadon and Lemmy use the same protocol.
You can even see accounts and posts from Mastodon on Lemmy, and the other way around too.
But yes, email is great.
I’ve heard it’s (currently) impossible to post on Mastodon with a Lemmy account due to how both are differently built, unless you’re referring to seeing a Lemmy discussion from Mastodon.
kbin/mbin does have some mastadonesque facilities. So it straddles the line between threadiverse and I dunno what we call the mastadon side.
@P4ulin_Kbana
> I’ve heard it’s (currently) impossible to post on Mastodon with a Lemmy account due to how both are differently built, unless you’re referring to seeing a Lemmy discussion from MastodonI’m trying to reply to this with a Mastodon account. I’ll be interested to see if it appears in the discussion on Lemmy instances, and if replies to it from Lemmy appear in my @mentions here.
Now if government officials start accepting a fediverse based communication, I will create a separate instance for that and it will be totally safe for work, only used for communications with the government.
Usenet or Fidonet would be a more apt comparison
Usenet/IRC/BBS sitting in the background like: Am I a joke to you?
IRC was “kinda” federated. You needed to convince a server already in the network to accept your server. But in the early days requirements were quite low.
BBS was not really federated (except Fidonet I guess).
Usenet, I guess it kinda was. But only ISPs were really running NNTP servers. Only they and unis really had the resources to too.
And XMPP (1999).
Oh Jabber the true RCS of the day.
