this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
It’s funny; I know the usual advice is to stick to com/net/org, but I think there’s a certain crowd online that’s all about the wacky TLDs. I’ve definitely seen devs and artists with TLDs like .pizza and .rocks (not a portfolio, but https://stoneclub.rocks as example). I’ve seen enough of these sites that something like https://sh.itjust.works doesn’t make me blink and I trust I’d be able to tell a phishing site from folks playing with TLDs, but I can totally understand how that could be off-putting without that sort of background.
If I see a URL like this, I, and.... polling my coworkers here..... All 52 coworkers on my group chat would say these are highly suspicious and would not click on them. I imagine this is the general consensus for internet-savvy people.
It would be great if links to remote Lemmy instances had some kind of styling applied; a little icon, etc., that would make it clear this link is within the fediverse.
Again, I think there’s a certain crowd of internet users who are familiar with fun domain names and enjoy playing in that space. My example is particularly innocuous (a club of people who love stone megaliths in the UK). I also think the fun and playful names aren’t difficult to tell from phishing sites, but maybe I have a gut instinct developed from exposure to the folks who do use playful domains.
My point is that thinking these quirky links look dangerous is specific to a certain social or generational group, and it wouldn’t hurt for them to keep an open mind about URLs/TLDs.
(Adding an icon to remote fediverse instance links is a nice idea too.)