this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Fediverse

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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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What do you think some of the fediverse's primary stumbling blocks are? (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago by ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, what's stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?

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[–] modulus@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 years ago (9 children)

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).

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

This is one of the ideal use cases for Solid, in development by MIT and Tim Burners-Lee. Basically, you host a central store of data, including one or more user accounts, and allow access to it from other services.

[–] mnrockclimber 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This was the original premise of app.net - a social service from years back. They built a “social backbone”. They offered you a single place where your identity and friends were housed. Other people could build apps on top of the backbone.

So you would join say a clone of Instagram and all your friends were still there. And your account still worked. Or they had a Twitter clone. Same deal. It was a single sign-on social account/identity/social graph that was separate from the apps. So things could just plug in.

Worked great. But it was a paid service. And came out right at peak Facebook so it died off.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Ooh neat. Too bad that it was paid. And centralized/private for that matter.

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