It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it's almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just "Join Lemmy" and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren't and it feels like it should be the other way around?
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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We need to build some kind of SSO that allows Lemmy users to authenticate with the same account on any instance, but will appear as if you're still using the instance you registered on. That way you could just login to another instance if your 'home' instance goes down for whatever reason.
I like the sound of this, just unsure how this would be able to authenticate an account on behalf of a home instance that's down, in a trustworthy way.
I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Lemmy and the Fediverse, so the following is based on similar implementations I'm familiar with...
SSO implementations usually require the website the user originally registered on (home instance) to confirm the account is real and authenticate it, and in most cases a new user account is automatically created using the SSO authentication details (this would prevent the user from appearing as if they're using their home instance).
To achieve what you want, I think we'd need some kind of way to export the user account and any signing keys used to prove the user is who they claim to be in the fediverse, and then re-import those to another instance. I'm not too sure if SSO would be able to achieve it if the home instance is down.
On the flip side, I'm pretty sure SSO with a Lemmy instance that is active could work. While it would bring a lot of benefit to less tech-savvy users, and a lot of convenience to us when we're given a threadiverse link to another instance, from a technical perspective I think that would be a challenging implementation. Users would need to be careful about having their credentials phished on a malicious instance too
i'd also be worried that some corp would try to take control of the centralized sso mechanism and thus control the user base. imho we must avoid the instinct to centralize anything.
but potentially maybe there's a federated directory where people could register and be assigned a server to do load balancing to key problems like lemmy.ml are experiencing (?)
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it's like email. You need a server somewhere to hold your inbox. They should make an easy way to migrate your user to another instance, though.
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Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless.
IMO, this couldn't be further from the truth. Different communities have different priorities, principles, and technical requirements, and will take different approaches to controversy. Some communities are low-profile and laid back. Others are magnets for abuse and may require additional moderation, and even technical changes, like disabling image embeds (as one example) to mitigate harassment. Some are filled with avid shitposters, while others insist on the utmost degree of civility. Some have advanced requirements for operational security. Some want broad access to the network, while other would prefer a quiet corner. Some might be focused on video and require an instance that can handle the additional bandwidth and storage requirements.
Who hosts your instance is important. The jurisdiction your instance is housed in is important. If a community requires special accommodations for accessibility or other reasons, that is important. If an instance wants to go above the technical level and do things like verify users (kinda like journa.host) that makes an important distinction from your typical instance.
In the beginning, we won't know who's trustworthy, but this is the Internet. There will be controversies, and we will see how various admins respond to these controversies. Over time, they will gain reputations, both good and bad. It is best if somebody who already has a good reputation, like a respected mod from another community is able to operate the new home for that community.
For now, it probably doesn't matter where you end up, but as time passes, it is good to keep an ear to the ground and see how things develop. Eventually you will find a solid niche. This is a problem even the fanciest join-xyz-fediservice website can't really solve, but it is meaningful.
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It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
User accounts can be independent of anyone else's instance. You just have to host your own.
But it's always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else's instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn't want to do that.
The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is...less practical than you might think.
The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user's name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.
I do think there's room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you're registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.
It would also be cool to be able to not have communities be locked to where they're created or at least make them mobile.
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on [email protected] it can merge with [email protected] and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
I think the best option to bridge the gap between nearly identical communities on different instances (and even the same instance) would be some kind of post tagging.
Say you post something on lemmy.ml/c/piracy but has to do with bittorrent or something. The original post can get a piracy and bittorrent tag that you can click on that to see all posts across instances with that tag. Kinda like hashtags and such on mastodon work, but on lemmy.
The thing about reddit clones is I think they try to be too much like reddit. The best thing about leaving reddit and starting new platforms is that they can really be anything the community wants it to be.
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This was enough for me to start my own instance. It's not too hard with ansible, and Lemmy being Rust it's not needing that much CPU or RAM.
And I'll invite my friends here too. If you're capable of running your own server, do it for your friends. Form small communities and you can always subscribe to the big server communities from your own service.
That'll give me a use for my TrueNAS server that's for sure. It's got 24 cores 200gb of RAM and I basically use it exclusively for a NAS.
Now I just have to look into how to set it up.
As long as you get a public IP address, a domain name and TLS certificate, you can federate with other servers.
I run mine in a small Hetzner box. Two gigabytes of RAM, two AMD cores, it's almost like doing nothing even I'm federating a ton of messages all the time regarding the logs.
There should be a thread for this(starting a instance)
While the other recommendation in the thread are good, I think they are hard to implement things that will take time.
A quick fix solution can be to add a button on join-lemmy which says something like 'Confused on where to join? click to join a recommended instance' that redirects to the sign-up of one of the recommended instances (there is already a list).
This will allow for load balancing and easier time for people to just come and join.
This will mean that the 'most recommended' instance will get absolutely hammered with new registrations though. Some randomisation should be necessary.
But not too random, since some instances ate brand new and there's no guarantee they'll stay up, which might put off new users looking for something stable.
Indeed, there is a balance somewhere and the community+devs will have to experiment a bit the comings weeks and months to find the sweet spot.
I personally belief that regional instances are the way to go.
And at some point we also gotta think about how to organize the instances...legally, financially and technically. For now I'm really happy at how the instance I'm on is run. But to be fair. I have no clue who is running it. I have no clue wether I'm going to agree with future decisions. I don't even know if it will be around next week. Maybe the owner just decides he has more important things in life to do (which is fair tbh).
The model that lemmy is based on gives us all the tools to organize instances however we want to. I really want to see community owned instances. Here in Germany social non profit clubs are a thing. You can officially register them and there are laws, regulations that protect them from just being taken over. They have boards that get elected by the members on a regular basis. I think that could be a great model on how to run an instance that is truly owned by its members.
I'm sure there are similar models of organization in other countries too.
I think a barrier to wide-spread adoption of lemmy is that for a regular joe, the instance system is a bit confusing. I'm seeing a lot of people comparing the instances to email servers, but I think something they're missing is that there are a few large email providers which most people default to (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) and a bunch of smaller ones which people go to if they disagree with the policies of the larger ones (e.g. protonmail)
I think that if lemmy is to replace reddit as the most widely-used link aggregator, we need some kind of default server (or set of default servers) which is large enough that people feel comfortable with settling in on. That way user base growth isn't hindered by confusion. If they later decide that a smaller instance suits their needs better (whether that be the moderation practices or site reliability), they can uproot and move their account there.
I think that with the growing popularity of Lemmy and kbin the registration process will naturally become more intuitive over time. Especially on the short term I expect a lot of tweaking to happen.
Im honestly not so sure about the “more intuitive over time” part. I feel like a lot of people who are using lemmy currently are already pretty technically inclined, and they’re already mildly confused as to how accounts work. If that’s the case, imagine how a normal person feels. I don’t think we can rely on things getting smoothed out over time if we’re to maximize the short-term intake of users caused by the reddit exodus.
I do agree with that. This is definitely a barrier of entry. But you can't really completely get rid of it without taking away what makes lemmy what it is: A federated network and it's integral to what it is trying to acheive.
What I do believe you can do is mitigate it. "Default servers" could be part of that. Again I can only advocate for regional servers. In the bigger countries you can make that based on a 1 default server per state or region/province level. In smaller countries even one instance per country might be enough. People would automatically be on an instance that is uses their native language. You could also kinda slowly introduce them to the idea of federation like that: "This is the instance for your country. But you can also explore other countries and interact with their people".
Somebody could create a landing page to automatically pick an instance for a user based on what language their system is set to and their IP adress. A German user goes to the website and gets to pick the state they live in. They are getting suggested a server that correlates to whatever state they picked.
Obviously for now it would be overkill to create an instance for every single state. But hopefully we will get there.
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Regional servers are great, especially when it comes to regional laws and customs which people generally want applied (for example UK has quite strong Hate Crime laws, I’m sure DE does too).
I do think however, in early stages, I’d rather know who is running my instance and a few of their personal opinions. For example, are they going to defederate with an instance I quite like because of politics? We are really in early days here and these instances are very unstable whereas the mastodon instances have all been around with thousands of users for quite a time.
Here in Germany social non profit clubs are a thing. You can officially register them and there are laws, regulations that protect them from just being taken over. They have boards that get elected by the members on a regular basis. I think that could be a great model on how to run an instance that is truly owned by its members.
If someone wants to go ahead, count me in.
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I didn't wait for the AMA to get hammered
Remember folks, even if you do or don’t like Lemmy it is an alternative that appreciates the increased interest.
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It'll balance out as more instances start up. I also joined blahaj. The flurry of activity gives me some vague sense of hope that most of the communities I followed on reddit will be able to restart on Lemmy.
Its almost too late, ive seen posts on several subs saying they're shutting down permanently due to the effective permanent removal of 3rd party mod tools and the misery of the 1st party apps. Reddit could be looking at a mass exodus a-la-digg. It remains to be seen how the fediverse will handle the mass influx of former redditors. If Spez has any shred of decency left he'd apologize profusely, return to a free API, and then beg the mods who are leaving to stay. Knowing capitalists, he absolutely will not.
Nah, read the AMA. He and Reddit (the company) in general are doubling down. I was hoping it was just anchoring (where the initial price for something is so ridiculously high, any other offer even if it's more than you should pay seems reasonable). But from his comments, and the Devs' responses, it's clear it's basically just a way to kill the API totally for users, I guess the only possible remaining use for the API is AI training. Tech companies would probably pay that much because it genuinely is worth it to them.
Yeah, I saw the comment he made about the Apollo developer. He's lying plainly, without even trying to refute any claims made against him and his team. He really believes the company can stand to float on a more mainstream userbase. I doubt it honestly. More likely it will start a slow trend downwards as the mods are mostly leaving, so the site will have to deal with massive site wide content moderation and community management issues. He doesn't care. Maybe he's already checked out and he plans to step aside once this transitory phase is over.
The idea that reddit can survive purely on a mainstream userbase is ludicrous anyway, the entire point of the website has always been its many niche communities. Its ecosystem of interconnecting and interacting user groups. Thats never going to be a big sell to pure social media oriented users, who already have Instagram and TikTok to fulfill their algorithm needs. So financially I have no idea how they plan to survive in the long term.
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yeah, that ama convinced me it was time to take the plunge. just created this account, first comment on lemmy lol
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At least he was honest enough to say that the sudden massive turnaround in their attitude to API pricing was their realisation they had the AI bros over a barrel.
Given how much of the content used in the existing models has been shown to have been scraped in violation of usage licences and copyright, anyone who is serious about developing new models is going to be scrabbling desperately to get access to good data sets.
The Reddit board now realise that charging through the nose for access to their API might generate them more money than all those annoying users ever have.
I’m really curious to see how this will work out. Also very curious about being kinda at a start of the build up of a community. I know it’s not from “scratch”, but it’s still kinda exciting
Same. Most things in life I can say I really wasn't there from the beginning but this I really think I can lol. I hope I just don't do the "before it was cool" hipster thing
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mastodon struggled with scaling in the beginning, everytime elon strung more than four syllables together. a lot of admins there didn't know what the spikes would do - this is not a criticism, i would have had no idea either - and most new users piled into one or two big instances, as is happening here.
the more tech-savvy of the initial waves migrated to smaller instances, the instance admins figured out where the pain points were, and i think there were changes to mastodon itself. i expect all of these are coming for lemmy, and it's going to be lumpy here for a while just as it was in masto.
having lived through that, i came into a smaller instance here immediately. federation issues here are a bit gnarlier than on masto, but i trust that also will be sorted.
I've been looking at different Lemmy communities the second pushshift was down (and let's just say finding things on Reddit suddenly became a lot harder because the built-in search function is kinda limited in a bunch of ways), and just made my account today out of random chance essentially LOL
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