this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.
Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.
Your ID doesn’t need to be tied to any given server. You can move around and change your “home” server at will. Or if preferred you could stand up your own server for your usage, hold your identify on there, and still engage with the rest of Lemmy / fediverse.
It’s less a design mistake and more a technical constraint. A users identify exists as, at a minimum, a database entry. That database needs to live somewhere that the various fediverse servers can talk to. But you have complete freedom in where that database entry is, and can change your mind later.
So it already doesn’t matter if you’re on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server - they all federate with each other (to varying degrees but that’s a slightly different conversation)
It matters in terms of keeping track of your subscriptions though, unless I'm missing something. I essentially need to decide if I'm going to use my account on server A and subscribe to all the federated content I want on server B, or vice versa. If A goes down or if I lose interest in it, I'll need to re-establish somewhere else and resubscribe everything.
I guess the answer is to host your own instance and federate everything, but federation doesn't seem 100% reliable and you also lose the local view.
Correct, as of now, but the point is that you can resub elsewhere. This is entirely impossible on centralised private platforms like Reddit.
How does that work? I know that it's an option on Mastodon, but from what I understand, this is yet to be implemented into Lemmy.
Edit: spelling
It’s something of a manual process for Lemmy right now, you’d need to set up on another server and manually add your communities but the point is you can still “move home” and still interact with the same communities and people. If you don’t like having your stuff on Reddit, on the other hand, your options are put up with it or no longer be able to be part of that community.
So if you join a fediverse server of any flavour and the admins reveal themselves to have view incompatible with your own, or the server goes to shit, or it just has to shut down due to lack of funds or whatever you don’t get locked out of the places you have been hanging out in.
That's not moving your identity though, that's creating a new identity that subscribes to the same communities. There's an important distinction there, there's no way to clearly identify yourself as you having moved, which conversely also means there's no way to be assured that some other account is not an impersonator.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to know that if a server were to disappear that I could just create an account on another one but it's still a distinction that causes some issues today that will need to be ironed out in future.
Depends on how we define an identity.. the dataset doesn’t move (would be a great feature if that gets added similar to Mastodon and others, but we have to appreciate Lemmy is young and developed entirely by volunteers) but “you” do.
Regardless it’s still a significant conceptual improvement over Reddit where you’re either there on the centralised service or you’re not there at all.
I think you’ve some valuable insights though, and would genuinely encourage you to get involved in their GitHub. If you can code, and have time to offer, you can even start to build the functionality. If not you can raise the question or check for it already being and add your comments to it to make the use-case :)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
I fully agree that it's simpler to create an account on a centralized website.
In my understanding, your comments have to be stored on a server whatever the centralization. The fact that you can choose on which server they are stored is the decentralization.
I think it's important not to become overly attached to an identity on any social media platform, which is kinda the concept they're going for here. Your post history doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things for the most part and will still be there anyway unless that server shuts down (even then there's ways around that if you're really concerned).
Personally, I was already in the habit of creating a new Reddit account about once a year so that any previous baggage, things I'd revealed about myself and so forth didn't follow me for too long. Once I got over that big karma number go up dopamine hit I stopped caring at all for my previous identities. I say this as someone who has accounts on Reddit dating back to almost the very beginning.