I’ve introduced two of my friends (not into tech) to Lemmy. Since they’re not into tech this is their first web forum.
I’ve explained the federation thru the usual email metaphore and that’s ok, but to lookup for communities is not quite there on client side.
Let me explain.
He wanted to see all the communities on an instance because that instance is in his native language but he’s registered on another instance. So to see all those communities you must go on instance.domain/communities, copy the name of the community you are interessed in and paste it inside the app/web client to look it up.
And to see all the communities all over the fediverse you must use lemmyverse.net which is a cool site, but still you got to copy paste back and forth to the app.
This could be implementend inside app itself by listing all communities and add ability to filter by things like instance.
Obviously open to discussion about the issue itself and how that could be improved.
Feel free to tag apps/clients devs to ear their opinion too.
I addressed most of that in Tesseract. It lets you browse other instances directly and one-click load / subscribe to communities.
Would love to see other 3rd party UIs incorporate something like this.
Amazing. One feature that is desperately needed on Lemmy is to open a post in another instance, not just a community or a user.
If you can elaborate on that, I can probably add that as a feature. It already has that capability, but it’s not exposed as a “view post on X instance” in any menus.
Edit: Added buttons in the post and comment action menus to “View [Post | Comment] on Home Instance”. Thanks for the feature idea.
Instance agnostic post and comment links need to be implemented as well, and would address the underlying challenge in “opening a post in another instance”.
Edit: For now, Lemmy Universal Link Switcher is a great browser script which mostly simulates the functionality of instance agnostic post and comment links. It would be great if the equivalent functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.
Clients can work around it by making a search on the home instance that filters by community id and submitter id. Something like this.
Lemmy Universal Link Switcher also pretty good. It would be great if such functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.
Without content addressing that’s almost impossible
You can’t have content addressing because it’s mutable. On the other hand, UUIDs are made for that. There’s even multiple types of UUIDs made for distributed computing with namespaces and such.
Bluesky does strict content addressing with hashes plus post ID (unique per repository, this allows edits). So you can choose which version to refer to. If you need to archive or mirror stuff you can use the hash, and threads can have both methods so you can see which version of a comment somebody replied to, etc.
Non-techie here. It’s true. I have no idea how !instance.domain/community works.
I understand that I’m on an island. Lemmy.World is a pretty big island, kinda like Austrailia, but it is still an island.
I can’t just go to otherinstance.otherdomain/community and click subscribe. Or comment. Or anything. That instance should know I’m Lost_My_Mind@Lemmy.World just by the fact that I’m still logged into Lemmy.World, even if I’m on Lemmy.ml
So if I go to any other instance, I shouldn’t have to do a thing.
As long as I’m not banned from Lemmy.ml, and as long as Lemmy.ml hasn’t defederated from Lemmy.World, I should be able to log in on Lemmy.World, travel to Lemmy.ml, and immediately be able to comment, upvote, downvote, subscribe, whatever. And when I do these things, even though I’M on Lemmy.ml, my actions will have come from Lemmy.World
Lemmy/The Fediverse is a great idea. It has a lot of foundationally sound ideas that should be able to continue to thrive for decades. It just needs a userbase.
I remember in 2000 saying the same things about linux…and it never got that userbase until Android took all the techie sound ideas, and put them behind the curtain. When 16 year old blond valley girl Britney uses her Android phone, she doesn’t know what a terminal is. She doesn’t have to know. She doesn’t have to think about it. She just opens her app drawer and plays spotify. And thats it.
I know the concept of a techie platform hiding the techie advancements sounds completely foreign to the idea of someone who spent 3 years learning how to techie, but thats what needs to happen.
Otherwise Britney will get about two sentences into you explaining the fediverse, before her brain turns off.
If Britney can’t use it, this will have a userbase to reddit, in the same way that Linux has a userbase compared to Mac/Windows.
Lenny can grow. I feel like the ideas here are built to last. They just need to be more accessable to idiots. I have other issues I feel could be fixed, but I think this one is by far the biggest barrier to entry for most.
You make great points. I think this should be one of the top goals for frontend Lemmy devs. Most users are not super technical. The fediverse (lemmy included) should work with minimal friction to be accessible.
If you’re open to it, I’d love to get your feedback on my Lemmy frontend’s onboarding and overall user experience. I’ve been trying to make it simple, effective, and accessible. I can DM you!
I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.
Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.
But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.
Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.
I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)
But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.
A lot of this doesn’t work easily on the activitypub model, because accounts and posts and communities live on their host instances, and every interaction has to be relayed to them and updates have to be retrieved from them.
While you can set up mirrors with arbitrary additional moderation that can be seen from everywhere, you can’t support submission of content from instances blocked by the host instance.
The bluesky model with content addressing can create that experience by allowing the creation of “roaming” communities where posts and comments can be collected by multiple hosts who each can apply their own filtering. Since posts are signed and comment trees use hashes of the parent you can’t manipulate others’ posts undetected.
Bluesky already has 3rd party moderation label services and 3rd party feed generators for its Twitter-like service, and a fork replicating a forum model could have 3rd party forum views and 3rd party moderation applied similarly.
login to lemmy.world travel to lemmy.ml and be able to comment.
See, this is kind of impossible because of security reasons.
Imagine logging in on gmail, going to facebook (without any further action in between) and being able to read your emails. That would be convenient but catastrophic!
Yes, I know, FB and gmail are two different things, but the concept of auth is the same. A website saves a cookie in your browser and uses it to check whether you’re authenticated or not. And that website can AND SHOULD only be able to read its own cookies.
I really miss having Liftoff work because it has been the only app I’ve used on android that actually had a functioning search feature that let you search individual posts, community names, instances, or users.
@zackitrocity@lemmy.world: pls come back 🥺
