Fediverse

netsplits/defederation.

You can't just tell someone to register for any server, and they will be able to see everything. So they then have to choose a server, which takes effort, and can cause analysis paralysis.

Once the fediverse gains significant traction there will be a huge coordinated media smear campaign to associate it with extremism, CP, violent crime, terrorism etc.. The "won't anyone think of the children" attack will be leveraged to ""regulate"" the fediverse (probably by legacy social media like Meta alongside the security state), aka transform it into regular old centrally controlled social media. Upload filters, encryption back doors, know your customer laws etc.. Non-regulated decentralized social media will be attempted to be made illegal, not sure if it will succeed.

So yeah eventually any true decentralized social media will have to move completely into the "darknet".

1. Onboarding
2. It lacks the critical mass to accumulate more users
3. Account migration / excessive defederation

Controversial and probably unpopular opinion:

• the biggest hurdle the fediverse faces is that it's not run by a business with monetary incentives to make it more popular and doesn't have any marketing / market research / product managers focused on gaining users.

I'm someone who hates advertising with a burning and seething passion, and I'm no lover of capitalism, but from a systemic standpoint there's a reason most open source projects burn out and go nowhere, and for-profit businesses have a higher chance of survival, because there's direct incentives (you know money/food) to keep making commercial software and increasing it's user base, but there isn't for hobbyist and open source software. Especially in the case of a social network that is only as valuable as the content and users on it, this might be a long term systemic issue.

what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles?

For Lemmy:

• Onboarding. Newcomers should not have to decide which instance to use. They know nothing to make that decision. An algorithm should make an educated guess. Even a random pick might be better than forcing them to choose. Manual choice should still be available as an advanced signup method, but the default should be as quick and simple as possible.
• Account Migration. The lack thereof only increases the pressure for making a good choice for your first instance. If we could easily migrate accounts, this would also ease the signup burden. 3rd party tools exist, but this should be a core feature.
• Discovery. There exist dozens of tools for discovering communities, which shows how bad the built-in search function is. This should be a core feature with no need for 3rd party tools. I should not have to care wether someone else from my instance already searched for the same community or wether I'm the first.
• Stream Aggregation. I signed up to loads of niche communities (which do get new posts), but never see any of those in my stream, no matter which mode I choose. I even started to unsubscribe from big communities to give smaller content a chance, to no avail. This effectively hides original and interesting content from view, and makes the overall experience more boring.
• Remote Instance Posts and Comments. When looking up a specific post or comment, I probably cannot do so while being logged in. Which means, I can read it, but cannot interact with it.
• Remote Instance Communities. When browsing the communities of another instance (for example, a themed instance like mander.xyz), I can only do so while being logged out. When I find an interesting community, I have to manually copy the link, search for it in another logged-in tab, find it again, to finally subscribe.
• Lack of Niche Content. It's getting better, but we still have a long way to go. This probably needs more general growth, but some technical aspects (like Stream Aggregation, Discovery and Remote Instance Browsing) also make it harder for niche communities to gain traction.
• GDPR Compliance. A private person and a public institution (which publishes educational content and videos) explicitly mentioned to me that they cannot join Lemmy since Lemmy cannot assure GDPR Compliance. I don't know wether that's true, just reporting the reason.

Overall, it still requires significant willingness to either accept missing features and content, or jump through technical hoops to regain some.

My experience on other fediverse platforms was similar, which most often resulted in me staying away from that particular service for now.

Onboarding. The fact that you have to choose an instance to join while creating an account is essentially forcing people to make a decision for which, unless they’ve done some reading, they’ll have no idea of the implications. It’s such a weird concept for new users - they have to know about a thing before they’ve had experience with a thing.

Even if it doesn’t really matter which instance you begin with, the experience will be different, and there’s a sense of “pressure” at the point of signup, which doesn’t exist outside of the Fediverse.

The biggest issues for me are:

1. No centralisation means there's no canonical single source of truth.
2. Account migration.
3. Implementation compatibility.

No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set--and only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.

Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.

Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).

For me, aside from picking initially between kbin and Lemmy and then picking an instance (and the whole concept of instances), it was not having an algorithmically created feed. It took a bit to wrap my mind around since all of the social media apps and sites I was used to (and still use) provides this.

I was confronted with building my own feed by topic of interest (aka community or magazine) or else.face a firehose of all content from all local or federated instances. I mean, I did it, so it wasn't that big a barrier, but it still required effort and conscious decision making on my part just to set up the thing to be usable. It's probably one of the reasons why I don't use Mastodon that much, because it's easier to join/subscribe to topics in kbin and Lemmy (at least in my experience). Mastodon seems to be for following individuals and organizations, and that's even more work (for me).

The platforms copied the design of centralized services without making enough adjustments to accommodate the different UX that a decentralized federated system brings. Some things that I think should be standard that currently aren't:

1. I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
2. I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
3. PeerTube has a “remote subscribe” option where you fill in a little box with your @username@domain and it’ll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it’d be great.
4. Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other’s hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you’re looking up is most commonly used.
5. Links to known Fediverse instances should open on your instance where you can interact with it rather than taking you to their instance where you can't.

Implement these and the experience would be much better.

defederation. Set up my own instance to choose myself on who I want to defederate with

Extremist political propaganda from instances like Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and Exploding Heads.

I won't recommend it to anyone in it's current state.

Lack of documentation.

Recent example is Firefish. I love the platform, and I'm okay with discovering stuff on my own, but I can get why other people can be lost without exhaustive documentation

There is this trend of mass downvoting your account if you disagree with political propaganda on any spectrum and they follow any instance. We need a workaround for mass downvoting.

1. I need an extensive guide on how to find the right Fediverse spaces for the social experience I'm trying to get. Ie. App marketing, instance marketing

2. The Fediverse needs to offer, on the surface non-technical, things that corporate social medias don't currently offer.

Ie. Killer app features

I'm a little surprised across the responses so far that there's been no mention of the adoption of or migration to a fediverse platform of some prominent creatives or communities.

It's understandable why they haven't given many of the issues already mentioned thus far, but in terms of others jumping in to federated services, among the least technical stumbling blocks by far is probably the absence of those (or those communities) they'd like to continue following (or participating in) here. Some of that may fall under discoverability/onboarding & content or critical mass mentioned, but it still caught my eye that it wasn't specifically mentioned.

I suppose by its lack of specific mention this mightn't be seen as being as much of an issue?

The biggest problem to me, seems to be the lack of ability to block people, communities, and instances. It's built into some apps, but really needs to be part of the platform.

I block all porn instances, for example.