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.

  • noodlejetski@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    Lemmy needs two things to be successful:

    1. users
    2. users

    and it’s already getting more and more of each of those.

      • Spzi@lemmy.click
        1·
        2 years ago

        I mean …

        That’s active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.

        So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.

        One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don’t think it’s right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren’t.

    • farizer@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      It is a lot easier to attract users if you do not have to make an account on many different instances

  • Sphere@reddthat.com
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think these are “nice to have” features rather than absolutely essential, but:

    For 1. I could deal with just being able to download my list of subscriptions and upload it to another server. That’s the only bit that’s really slow to copy over by hand.

    For 2. I think the main thing that really would benefit is the ability to search all active communities on all servers. The way it is now is alright if there are only half a dozen really active instances whose communities I might be interested in, but it doesn’t scale if there are hundreds of servers to check out. Probably the more important of the two IMHO in the long run.

    • palitu@lemmy.perthchat.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, search all federated communities.

      It would not be hard to get a list of all communities on each federated instance. Update it a few times a day, even once a day.

      But this is the hardest thing for me, searching is a challenge

  • catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca
    1·
    2 years ago

    These are good points. It sucks that as a PhD student in CS, I still don’t understand the workings of federation and other important Internet concepts. I hope someone smarter will work on this stuff, though.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    The Fediverse in general needs federated identities, preferrably self-sovereign. Something like nostr, with validation signatures. E.g., you own your ID, and validate it with some mechanism of your preference. If midwest.social trusts your validator, it creates a space for your ID.

    I don’t think this is conceptually or implementationally difficult, but it would require a well written standard and consider both privacy issues (for users) and protections against spammers and bad actors (for hosting providers). I don’t thing PGP’s web-of-trust model would be a bad one. I think using the nostr network (quasi online chain) would be a great idea, and all of the parts are there; it would need a decent UI and support in each Fedi server implementation - which would be the biggest hurdle.

    This would address the DID issue, and I agree with you that this is issue #1. Right now, users don’t own their identities: their hosting service does. If midwest.social chose to, they could nuke my account and the canonical source of truth for all my posts. I run my own ActivityPub server and so own the account I use for Mastodon; and, perhaps, someday Fediverse federation will evolve to the point where I can use that account for everything. But it’s an expensive node for me to operate, and not everyone can run their own server. Better, self-sovereign, and truly federated DIDs is incredibly important.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.one
    1·
    2 years ago

    Point 1 is part of why I’m gonna start self-hosting a Lemmy instance at some point. If I host my own instance then I can back up my data and ensure it’s never lost.

  • Mintyytea@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think number 1 is important so it’s easier to move. Otherwise we could feel centralized to one instance rather than feeling free to federate

  • 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.

  • Tom@lemmy.one
    1·
    2 years ago

    Thank you for finding and writing the words for it.

    Both points describe very well what I miss at least in Lemmy like Fediverse platforms.

  • reid@beehaw.org
    0·
    2 years ago

    I think there’s a third big thing: really good UX. I don’t have an Android phone, so I don’t know about Jerboa, but the web interface … could use some work. I know the bug with new posts pushing the feed down is on track to be fixed soon, but wow, it can be really quite bad. iOS apps are getting way better quickly, too, but overall they’re nascent.

    I can’t quite put my finger on it, but additionally, I think the ranking algorithm(s) could use some work. I can see there’s tons of content, if I sort by new, but sorting by active results in stale posts, and sorting by hot doesn’t seem to quite hit the sweet spot on tenured/good quality content vs. newness. The recent ranking bug(s) haven’t helped matters there either.

  • Mindless_Enigma@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Personally I don’t know if Lemmy needs these to be successful. Depending on your viewpoint, Lemmy already is successful. Lemmy instances existed long before the current Reddit influx and seemed to be doing okay even if things were a bit slow.

    Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site with the great benefit of federation allowing direct access and communication to other sites running in the fediverse. Identities and communities are specific to an instance because that instance is an independent community. In that frame of mind, having a different account on different instances and overlapping community topics between instances makes sense. Same way multiple forums have boards about the same topic and joining multiple forums meant multiple accounts. Federation just makes it easier to see across that gap.

    • Deestan@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site

      I think you are right, and I think a major contributor to this is how Lemmy is communicated. We are inviting people to a concept when they expect to be invited to a place.

      “Join Lemmy!” indicates Lemmy is the site. A site. One coherent system. Then “and pick a federated server” just seems like random frustration.

      “Join <the instance I am using>! It’s on Lemmy so you can easily contribute to the communities on Beehaw, lemmy.ml, toupoli, … without creating separate accounts there.” is how I think we should go about it.