In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:

  1. Lemmy needs DIDs.

    No, not dissociative identity disorder, Decentralized Identities.

    The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it’s up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.

    Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive “might not make it”, and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.

    This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn’t a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.

    *Banning the account could create the same issue.

  2. Communities need to federate too.

    Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.

Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.

What do you think?

EDIT: There’s been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.

It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.

  • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
    1·
    2 years ago

    Regarding point 1- if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-

    Things would go much smoother!

    Pick an instance based on uptime, or hell, create your own instance.

    Piling all of the eggs into a single basket is destined to result in failure.

    • someguy3@lemmy.ca
      1·
      2 years ago

      I signed up with lemmy.ca and I regret it. It doesn’t load “all” content very well so I have to hunt to find content. Hopefully they will fix it.

    • Spzi@lemmy.click
      0·
      2 years ago

      if people would just stop signing up on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org, because they have the most people-

      Things would go much smoother!

      Somehow I trust the individual instances to self regulate. When an instance thinks it should not grow any further at the moment, it can close for new registrations, and users will naturally flock to others which are still open. I don’t see this as a responsibility of the users, and in case of users completely new to lemmy, I also don’t see how they could make a reliably informed decision.

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
        0·
        2 years ago

        In all fairness- if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn’t allowing new registrations.

        That being said, those instances are overloaded. They have posted multiple threads on the issue already.

        • Spzi@lemmy.click
          0·
          2 years ago

          if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn’t allowing new registrations.

          I think anyways the registration process should be dumbed down. Simple version:

          • User sees no instances or servers during registration
          • When they click on ‘register’, a random instance (which allows new registrations) is chosen
          • There is a small link ‘advanced options’ which allows users to see and choose instances

          This would balance the load between instances and make it much easier for newcomers to join.

          I realize we were talking about slightly different views. You had a scenario in mind where people try to join a specific instance (for example because someone promoted that specific instance somewhere else), I was talking about https://join-lemmy.org/

          • BobQuasit@beehaw.org
            0·
            2 years ago

            That would be awkward in some cases. Say, if a non-Nazi ended up on a Nazi server by random chance.

            • Spzi@lemmy.click
              1·
              2 years ago

              You’re right, situations can occur. But it’s not a permanent thing. People can make another new account on an instance which they deem suitable after they have familiarized themselves with lemmy by spending some days or weeks in it. Expecting a bloody newcomer to choose a good instance isn’t so far from random choice anyways.

              Also tbh, I have little to no interactions with people from my instance. I subscribe to topics I care for regardless of where they are hosted. People like me would hardly notice they share a server with nazis, as each would flock to different communities.