Hear Me Out: We Probably Need More "Closed-off" Fediverse Servers
-
You can send this to your editor as well: that was a very blunt and forceful way of putting it. I could have been a little more constructive with the criticism.
Ultimately I read through it so clearly it wasn’t that bad lol
-
I think making your own instance is a big enough barrier to entry to avoid trolls, fediseer exists but has issues if you change your domain but use the same ip.
-
I don't think Lemmy has it (there is an open issue for invitation links that I don't believe anyone has worked on). I don't think MBin or Piefed have it either. Not sure about Mastodon. The beauty of FOSS though is if someone wants it bad enough, they can implement it themselves.
-
So not closed off as in non-federated, just invite only?
Yeah. We're talking about using invites to onboard people onto servers.
So a barrier like the ones that have applications, but based on something other than fiktering who joins the community? Not only is that counter to the entire point of federation, but invite only approaches only works for closed systems. Nobody is going to wait for an invite when they can just join any server.
Would you rather be invited to an event or fill out an application?
There's way less friction involved in sharing an invite code.
I also don't think that closed servers are "counter to the entire point of federation". Federation is about servers talking to other servers, it has nothing to do with how individual servers grow.
And if people don't care to wait for an invite to join a specific server, and they'd rather take the initiative to join a different server right away, that's fine too. They're still in the fediverse either way.
The topic of sharing invite codes is geared towards the type of people who aren't going to take that initiative in the first place. We get rid of the need for them to understand how the fediverse works by just giving them a ticket into some specific server. They can take it or leave it.
-
No hard feelings.
-
Do Lemmy, Mastodon and the other big fediverse projects already support invite-based registration using codes?
you could just put the invite code into the signup application questionnaire, a server admin can make it say "Invite code here:"
the admins could keep a spreadsheet of the invite codes like in Google Sheets, keep track of who was given the invite code and who received it
-
The beauty of FOSS though is if someone wants it bad enough, they can implement it themselves.
For sure. I've personally contributed to C++ FOSS projects before. There are a few big hurdles between idea and implementation though.
Personally I don't know enough about web development or the software stack involved in various fediverse projects to be of much help with implementation right now. So the only thing I can really do at this point in time is put the idea out there, whatever little that's worth.
-
I don’t think Lemmy has it (there is an open issue for invitation links that I don’t believe anyone has worked on).
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1777
but admins can do it in the signup application questionnaire and just keep track with a spreadsheet
-
Google+ did it and it didn't work.
-
I thought about mentioning that but removed it since the invites would really only be able to come from the admin and maybe a small select group of people. Setting up an invite system with a spreadsheet and involving more than just a few people would likely become a messy and complex endeavor very quickly.
-
I still don't know what Google+ was trying to be.
-
Herein lies a problem I've had for a while, actually. It's hard to tell people about Lemmy, because "Lemmy" isn't really a website, or an app, or even a platform, really. It's a protocol that anybody can use. For instance, we're not really posting comments here on Lemmy, as much as we are posting comments via Lemmy. Right now, I'm posting a comment on Lemmy World via Lemmy, from Fedia. The average new user is very quickly gonna get lost in the sauce with that.
So even the main recruitment page, "Join Lemmy", is kinda misleading because how do you join a protocol? It's kinda like saying "enlist with TCP/IP" or "create an account on HTTPS". Like... what does that even mean to a user? It leads most people into thinking that "Lemmy" is some centralized community with a hub of some sort, which is ironically antithetical to everything Lemmy stands for in the first place.
I think one solution to this would be to stop referring to things as being "on Lemmy", and instead use terms like "a Lemmy site" or "a Lemmy instance", which I think would help articulate the fact that "Lemmy" is a piece of software and not the community, itself. So when trying to refer friends to join a Lemmy instance, we should use the instance's name, instead of "Lemmy". But this brings about another problem; how does an instance form an identity to begin with?
Take Lemmy World here, for example: What is LW's "identity"? What kind of site is this? What's it about? What is the community here for? It's called Lemmy World, so is it about the Lemmy software? To the outsider, it just looks like an off-brand Reddit; which may be what some are looking for, but there's no real identity to be found in that.
You do have some instances that are a bit more focused, however, and have a distinct "identity" about them. Unfortunately, a lot of those are defederated from the major instances because of those identities (Lemmy.ML, Hexbear, etc). But there are also a lot of really good ones like the solarpunk or literature instances, and interestingly enough, LemmyNSFW, which all have their own focused subject matters but are still part of the Fediverse at large. When you sign up to one of those instances, you know what kind of community you're getting involved with. You're there for a reason, just like everybody else.
I think Beehaw does a good job in this, specifically; even though they're a "general purpose" instance much like Lemmy World, they have very clear guidelines and expectations for how users behave and what they post, which helps solidify its identity. If I tell you "think of a Beehaw user", you can probably concoct an idea in your head about what that person is like. If I tell you "think of a Lemmy World user"... can you even narrow it down enough to create a caricature at all?
I don't have any real point to all this, just rambling about some frustrations I've had for a while with the terminology of things around here. I dunno what the solution should really be.
-
You're probably right about Lemmy/threadiverse communities. I really don't put much thought into what server someone is posting from.
But when it comes to Mastodon I kind of wish that I was on a server with a tighter local community so that I could make more use of features like the local-only feed and local posts. Obviously I can switch to a smaller server or make my own, so it's not really a problem, but with Mastodon there are features that theoretically benefit from having stronger local communities.
Still, the meat of this suggestion is really just to use invites as yet another way to bring people into servers, in addition to having a big list of fully open servers, as well as application-based closed servers.
-
I still don’t know what Google+ was trying to be
And this guy worked on the Google+ team for sixteen years
-
explain to me why we can't just use invite codes without having the servers closed off?
yeah, and Mastodon can already do that
-
maybe you could say "powered by Lemmy"? "part of the Lemmy network"?
as far as identity, I think for lemmy.world it's the same answer as Reddit's identity? which is a good thing, there's a bunch of instances that are slight variations on that identity and that's cool
-
You do you, but why not keep it simple? Friend to friend, just give your peers a link to the same instance you're on. We can start instance sports teams and find out who wins the tournaments!
-
Herein lies a problem I’ve had for a while, actually. It’s hard to tell people about Lemmy, because “Lemmy” isn’t really a website, or an app, or even a platform, really. It’s a protocol that anybody can use. For instance, we’re not really posting comments here on Lemmy, as much as we are posting comments via Lemmy.
Yeah... I agree.
One problem is that the names of software projects like "Mastodon" and "Lemmy" get mixed in with the names of servers like "mastodon.social", "mastodon.art", "lemmy.world", "lemmy.ml", etc.
That creates a lot of unnecessary confusion for potential new users, because they end up conflating the software with the server, thus missing the big idea of the fediverse completely: that a bunch of servers, even those running different software, can talk with each other to form one big social network.
But it's kind of a moot point because there probably isn't much that can be done about that now.
I just hope that in the future people will avoid using software names in their server branding, because it only confuses people.
-
Threads did that and people still flocking to the site, despite basically doing nothing new.
-
Some people pay a lot of attention to what instances people are from. I think I've had someone who jumped to negative assumptions about me because of what instance I'm using and I think I might have seen like one person from this instance - I pretty much never see people using the same instance, so its weird imagining someone seeing it enough to have an assumption about the users.
There are some servers that are a bit more tight-knit (hexbear comes to mind).
