Asklemmy

What we need are more backend and full stack developers to shore up the core functionality. A polished mobile app is not going to cancel out the other shortcomings.

There are critical bugs and missing functions/features that need to be addressed first. Otherwise the masses are going to take one look and never return.

The apps situation has gotten a lot better over the years, but I can't understate how big of a sea change it was when Mastodon first came along. Prior to them, most fediverse apps were terrible. The influx of clients that came out of that community changed the network in so many ways.

One of those Reddit 3PA devs need to get on board with the Fediverse and encourage their users to switch over. If they can make it seamless that'll bring in an influx of new members, for better or for worse.

Jerboa works for me, at least, better than the reddit official one ever did...

I honestly have no need to return to reddit, the communities I followed on reddit are starting to form on here, and I just really like the federated infrastructure as opposed to the centralized ad-driven social media

I've got a handful of friends where our only group chain is through a Matrix-Synapse server I have running in my closet. Everyone installed Element, and it works exactly like any other messaging program.

The only downside is that at the moment, it routinely and randomly struggles to decrypt certain messages.

Same here. Besides choosing an instance to join, the experience is easy enough that normies should be able to use it.

I think you're justified to be wary of the buzzwordiness of Blockchain though. For the 2 days I spent learning about what all this is before I signed up, every time I heard "de-centralized" I kept asking myself, "How sure am I that this isn't some weirdly elaborate crypto scam?"

Bonus fear: I was also concerned for a while that this was just going to be a refuge for hate groups who have been kicked off of major platforms. I've been pleasantly surprised so far.

These are both definitely pain points. The good news is that the second issue can be dealt with manually, even though it's annoying: you can copy and paste post links from the community on the server you're browsing, throw it into the search form, and the remote post will get pulled in. This is a common convention in almost all fediverse platforms.

Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. "Backed up" your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn't exist today. And even if it were added, how do you validate?

Normally, you deal with something like wanting to authenticate to many different entities via use of a public key. I suppose one could hypothetically have a mechanism to register a PGP or SSH pubkey with the network.

But I don't know how easy it would be for most users to handle the key management.

Bluesky is working on persistent identity with a DNS based scheme. You still have instance accounts but they're optional and posts reference DIDs so getting kicked out won't break mentions.

Regarding the first issue, you could check out https://hubzilla.org which has NomadicIdentity, but it still doesn't solve it for ActivityPub. Maybe later.

Lack of historical data. Are you the first subscriber to [email protected] through lemmy.world? Doesn't matter if the original community had fiftyleven posts. You only get to see any created after you subscribe?

This was suuuch a mystery for me as a noob, I didn't know what was happening!

I've been thinking about this for the last couple days, and I agree. There's even the problem of duplicate "subs* popping up on other instances. Federation as it currently is seems to be something that works a lot better with a Twitter alternative than a Reddit one. There's probably some tweaks that can be done to make it a more unified experience. I have some ideas, but I don't think they'd work.

These are my suggestions, and I'm sure there's a reason why they haven't been done.

• Break down the Lemmy/Kbin Federation further. Each sub is it's own instance, this makes it cheaper for people to run their own instances, instead of running a full blown site with several subs. This will also allow for replacements for subs to be created easily, and removes the chance for another Spez to show up.
• Make the user account an instance. Each individual post or comment is made to the user profile/instance, but is copied or reflected to the sub it is posted to. If the user account is deleted, a signal is sent to each server that the user has deleted their profile, and to remove each comment/post with the users unique ID.
• Make each sub lowercase and remove all white space, so that individual "comic" instances, or "funny" instances appear together by default.

Bookwyrm is so good! It's so simple, and just works. Somehow, it's one of those examples of the open source alternative actually being way less clunky and cluttered than the proprietary thing.

It's getting there...slowly. My answer to OP's question is...I'm surprised by how puritan the Fediverse userbase is.

But they're getting swarmed by horny redditors now, so it's only a matter of time before there's porn all over the place!

be the change you wanna see in the world

I absolutely LOVE the open source/federated aspects of things! I think it's just so cool and interesting to me how it all works! :)