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Planning for the future - a flaw in the design of Lemmy (and Kbin) (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by TerryMathews@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Hey all, so I've been trying to embrace the fediverse life. My background - I've been on the internet since pre-WWW, so I've seen it all.

I think there's a structural issue in the design of Lemmy, that's still correctable now but won't be if it gets much bigger. In short, I think we're federating the wrong data.

For those of you who used USENET back in the early days, when your ISP maintained a local copy of it, I think you'll pick up where I'm going with this fairly quickly. But I know there aren't a ton of us graybeards so I'll try to explain in detail.

As it's currently implemented, the Fediverse allows for multiple identically named communities to exist. I believe this is a mistake. The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance, and part of the atomic data exchanged through the federation should include the instance that "owns" the community and a list of moderators. Each member server of the Fediverse should maintain an identical list of communities, based on server federation. Just like USENET of yore.

This could also be the gateway into instance transference. If the instances are more in-sync, it will be easier to transfer either a user account or a community.

This would eliminate the largest pain point/learning curve that Lemmy has vs Reddit.

Open to thought. And I'll admit this isn't fully fleshed out, it was just something I was thinking about as I was driving home from work tonight

Lemmy is good, but it could be great.

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[-] lotanis@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 1 year ago

The way I see it everyone naturally assumes we're trying to recreate Reddit but with distributed computing.

I think instead we should be trying trying to create something that gives us the community and communication that Reddit gave us, but democratically and without reliance on or control from any one organisation.

This is going to result in some things that work differently from Reddit. We should work to make the experience smooth and intuitive, but it can end up with a different way of working.

[-] TerryMathews@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

100% agreed. I'm not advocating we "clone Reddit", however I do think we should think about and take meaningful steps to improve accessibility to non-"techy" people even if that means borrowing a few things from Reddit here and there.

Because let's face it, Reddit wasn't a whole-cloth original creation of spez and kn0thing. It's bones can be traced back to Digg, vBulletin, earlier BBS incarnations, in some respects even USENET - especially the way users can create topics/communities/subreddits on their own (yes, I know this isn't how USENET works now, but I promise it used to work this way if you were outside the main controlled newsgroups).

I'm a smart guy. I've got a lot of years of internet experience. I can make Lemmy work, and find content on it. It's cumbersome. My wife, is very techy by any reasonable standard but not as much as I am, has difficulty using it. She finds the structure unintuitive and confusing.

If those of us participating in this thread are the 0.1%, she's the 1%. To me, this moment, this movement, is about ensuring there's a place where people are free to discuss things that monied interests can no longer control. That's what makes the fediverse great - we can spread the load and demand out and make it manageable for normal people to do this.

I don't want another schmuck coming along telling me what ad I have to look at, or what I'm not allowed to discuss, or what app I have to use ever again.

I'm not the smartest guy in the room, I'm not claiming to have the answer only a suggestion. However, I am confident that this is a problem we need to tackle in some way if we ever want to achieve growth in "normal users".

[-] lotanis@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

Completely agree that there needs to be some strides in usability. I'm in exactly the same situation with myself and my wife in terms of what's needed to be able to recommend Lemmy to her.

I just wanted to get people thinking about a "product" direction and set of solutions to these problems that weren't only aimed at replicating Reddit.