That would require people actually recommending specific websites, and all people seem to want to do is circle jerk about “lemmy”, as if it’s a tangible place and not a website engine

If what you mean by centralized apps is apps having a default website, or a hard-coded website that it accesses, then that’s also going to lead to centralizing the website.

The fediverse is just the web. It’s not really suited to an app-first model of operation. Like, imagine having a blog-viewer app that only let you read one blog. We see this kind of behaviour from the business world, and people kind of hate it.

The only reason it would be different here is if the network collapses, and if it does, it’s going to collapse into lemmy.world.

Which, apparently, is a “deal breaker”.

No, that’s not true. The big email providers absolutely block smaller and personal hosts. There’s a whole system of features and options you need to install and support in order to get through the door, thanks to spammers.

The onboarding process should be happening after this point. People shouldn’t be going “I want to join Lemmy!”, because that’s kind of a non-sensical statement. Lemmy is a website engine. They should be going “I want to join awesomewebsite.com. Oh, and look, I can see stuff from anotheraweseomewebsite.net, too! That’s so cool!”

If the website itself cannot provide a compelling reason as to why someone should sign up for it, then why should they sign up for it? So that it can be a dumb-terminal for some other website?

But it’s better from many angles that they are. Discoverability alone. Consistency of instance level rules. Theme.

It just makes sense on some level that sports communities would be on a sports-focused website, and such a website is where people whose primary interest is in discussing sports would have their accounts. From there, they can follow other topics they’re interested in, but their primary focus is still on, I don’t know, basketball or whatever.

Same for cars. Some of the most active forums on the internet are car ownership forums. If you could access CivicForums from IoniqForums, then it would make sense to do so. Much more sense than finding people discussing Hondas on lemmy.world and Hyundais on sh.itjust.works.

Just because you don’t give a shit where these discussions are taking place, doesn’t mean it makes sense for people to just shit them out anywhere.

Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren’t intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can’t really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.

The fact that “Lemmy” isn’t a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you “saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning” and it be a meaningful statement. You can’t substitute “Lemmy” into that sentence, though, because there isn’t a Lemmy.

There’s a thousand Lemmys.

This.

There are rough edges to the actual onboarding experience, of course, but the joinlemmy and joinmastodon and joinwahtever websites really aren’t a part of it. They’re more of an ad for admins, demonstrating that there’s an active network of sites already using the product. The fact that not even the product develoeprs seem to understand this is a real issue, though.

Honestly, we need to stop sending people to “Lemmy” or “Mastodon” or whatever. Those are website engines. It’s like sending someone to “WordPress” when you want them to read your blog.

Honestly, I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem. Trying to make these spaces look like something they’re not makes people believe they work in a way that they don’t. It makes “Lemmy” look like wish-dot-com Reddit, and Mastodon look like temu Twitter.

This is all something new. This is a thousand Reddits, where you can see over the fence at what each other Reddit is talking about. It’s ten-thousand Twitters, where you can talk to people on other Twitters.

If you could post on Facebook articles from Twitter, people would get that maybe they don’t see every single comment, or every single Facebook article all of the time. This would be understood. Twitter and Facebook look like, and are discussed as if, they’re two totally different websites. The same would be true of AVForums and CivicForums, if they could cross-post.

But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity. And that seems wildly fucked up to me.

People need to stop sending people to “join ___” sites. I get why they are, or at least were, necessary, but they’re totally superfluous when users are making recommendations to other users.

Just recommend a website for them to join. Word of mouth + systematized signup makes zero sense.

I see the same names appearing over and over again in different communities. This is, of course, because this is still a relatively small space, but it’s something that has the potential to remain true even as things grow, because we don’t all need to be in the same politics community, or in the same gaming community, etc.

There’s more active moderation.

Tan Eggs.

Default instances would go a long way

No, suggesting actual websites to people, rather than “Lemmy”, would go a long way.

Default instances result in centralization. In recreating the existing structures that, ostensibly, we’re all here to reject.

There are still hiccups with nodeBB’s federation, and it’s not at all clear to me yet that it supports back-fetching forum posts yet. The devs are being super responsive, though, and I think we’ll see the rough edges sanded off quickly.

The same way out found bloggers for your RSS catchers.

It’s literally what federation is. It’s why discovery doesn’t work the way people expect.

Do you mean to say that PeerTube at least embeds videos? Because that’s news to me, and welcomed news at that

Not here, no. It does on Mastodon and other microblogs, though.

Boosting re-sends the original message, with the original message id attached, and both Lemmy and mbin filter filter out duplicates. On Lemmy, upvoting a post boosts it, and on mbin the functions are separate. Boosting works to get the community/magazine group actor to re-send the post to subscribed remote sites, so if the site you’re using subscribed to a community after the original post was made, it could now receive it thanks to the boost.

Well, it is a photo sharing platform.

It’s not unsocial. It’s just not mirroring multi-gigabyte files by default. It’s perfectly social if you use the website.

Everyone has to stop conflating the technology with the network. Lemmy is a website engine. PeerTube is a website engine. The ability to mirror content is not inherent to running a Lemmy- or PeerTube-based website. The network is not the primary object here.

It is a construct that arrises from content-mirroring.

Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view. If you’re federating videos, you’re letting other websites consume terabytes of your storage space amd bandwidth.

No. I think it works to hide the distributed nature of the fediverse, and works to make things that are inherent to a distributed model seem uncanney and broken.

It also strips some value out of the ‘local’ experience, communicating that each Mastodon-based website is the same as any other, and presenting something that looks like a dumb terminal, rather than a stand-alone website.

Ultimately, I think it’s bad for the fediverse.

So, I gather what you’re encountering is communities that are tossing out posts and comments that do not break any laws, on the basis that they find them distasteful. And you’re looking for an instance where communities will not do this, but that is also federated with all of the instances hosting the communities that are doing this.

But to what end? If you are still trying to interface with those communities, the posts will still be removed. Being on a “free speech instance” doesn’t insulate you from the rules of the communities you are engaging with. There’s only an issue if you’re finding yourself under pressure to change your own behaviour under threat of the admins banning you from the site.

You’re looking for a space where you will feel welcome, but where one of the key defining elements is making it easy to ignore that local space.

I’m not sure you’re presenting a coherent desire here.