or maybe some other terminology would be better? lots of people get confused when you ask them to choose an instance, sometimes I think even the word “proxy”, “host”, or “hub” is simpler

the specific terms aren’t my point, just a discussion to see if we can come up with a better name

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Maybe I’m misremembering the original “marketing” about it, but at least Lemmy has this to say:

    You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server/instance.

    That’s a lie, you can only access content that is federated with you, and there’s a complex set of relationships between instances where you will always be missing some portion of the fediverse (i.e. if C blocks A, and C posts to B, users from A don’t see that content on B, but users from B do).

    So I’m not sure if it was siloed by design, but Lemmy was designed to replace Reddit, so presumably the same notion of what Reddit means (people congregate into communities, instead of instances) is implied:

    Nutomic and I originally made Lemmy to fill the role as a federated alternative to Reddit, but as it grows, it has the potential become a main source of news and discussion, existing outside of the US’s jurisdictional domain and control.

    But I obviously can’t say for certain whether the original intention was to make tons of Reddit alternatives that all kind of connect to eachother, or to make a centralized Reddit alternative that is decentralized to prevent any one node disappearing from wrecking the network. If the former, I don’t really understand the point, and if the latter, I think it’s the wrong architecture.

    Regardless, it’s better than Reddit, so I stick around. I assume the same is true for Mastodon and Facebook.

    • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I mean, I wasn’t here a decadeo ago or so when the groundwork of the Fediverse was being laid, so I don’t know how it was originally “marketed”, but people make things without understanding the true implications of their decisions all of the time. And the current crop of leading products in the fediverse are a generation or three removed from the original designers.

      People build on top of stuff with goals that are off-target of the original goals of tech. Building a bunch of square pegs and ramming them through round holes just, ultimately, results in those pegs either not slipping through, or having their corners cut off.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yup, that’s the way FOSS goes. Build what interests you, and make mistakes along the way.

        Eventually the community seems to arrive at a decent solution though.

        I’m really interested in working on a project that makes a proper decentralized Reddit/Twitter.