I wonder if it might lead to some issues with European laws at some point

Lemm.ee/instances

But there’s this website that also tells you if other instances are defederated from yours: defed.xyz

That’s the thing though, it’s the luck of the draw and you might be unlucky and sign up to a bad instance and then it’s too late, first impression has been made and the user just goes back to Reddit.

Your instance is defederated from four other instances, so yeah it has an influence.

The difference is that the email provider you chose won’t make it so you can’t send an email to your friends because your providers don’t talk to one another.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, Lemmy’s (and Mastodon’s) issue is that the users experience is influenced by the decentralization.

The server side needs to be a decentralized database stored on a bunch of servers with all content available from one website with an API so people can develop apps for it (or even alternative websites), but otherwise the decentralization should have zero impact on what content the users have access to. In other words, do like Reddit but instead of having a ton of servers owned by AWS hosting everything, have those servers be owned by anyone who wants to host part of the database.

Having to choose a server and it influencing what content you can see is the biggest UX issue, not the availability of apps.

Interesting but it doesn’t remove admins from the equation and users still have to choose an instance to be associated with instead of just having a Lemmy account like they have a Reddit account…

It could be done without having to clone all data though. Reddit is hosted by AWS and their data is distributed on multiple servers, so replace AWS by a bunch of people like you and me providing disk space for the data and tada, you can decentralized the database and just give people access to interacting with it directly (through code) or via various front-ends that people would create.

From a user perspective the front-end they use would be like Reddit before the API bullshit, it’s just them using an app or a website to make things look good, but they have access to everything that’s in the database and they’re using the same credentials no matter which front-end they use.

The difference with Reddit is that since the hosts are just that, hosts to the data, they don’t have admin power over users. They can filter the data that’s hosted on their servers (like admins need to do now) but that content might be hosted by another server instead and they can’t ban a user from the website itself since they don’t control it (hence the crypto analogy, you can run a node, but it’s just you adding one more server to the bunch, you don’t have any real power over what’s happening).

And Mastodon is decentralized in a way that makes it so people don’t want to join the platform, so… To BlueSky we go!

If things were decentralized in similar way to crypto it would be way better for user adoption. The server side stuff is decentralized separately from the stuff users interacts with, so users can use a bunch of different websites to interact with the server side stuff, but they’re always using the same credentials no matter the website they use and no matter the website they can interact with everything that ever happened on the servers, no one has the power to prevent users from seeing some of the transactions that happened (no admins) because the website they use are just a front used to simplify interaction with the servers.