Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.

That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.

Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!

  • Pekka@feddit.nlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    This is about a user browsing on another Lemmy instance. For example, a user from lemmy.world receives a link on a chat app to a post on beehaw.org. Now he wants to reply to that post, to do so the user has to go to the same post on their home instance. Beehaw.org has no idea that the user has an account on lemmy.world, so they can’t just redirect the user. It is very difficult for Lemmy instances to share this data, as browsers have built in protections to prevent websites from sharing common identifiers (those were used to track people over multiple websites).

    A menu could be added where the user can select their instance, but that would still require Beehaw.org to know about the existence of the user’s home instance. This could still give issues with smaller instances, that are not well federated with other instances.