To me, it was the astounding amount of interactivity between the community.

At first I thought this was temporarily caused by the whole migration from the R site. But, just out of curiosity, I signed up to Mastodon and have enjoyed myself just as much as here.

Most of the Lemmy post’s / Mastodon toots have almost as much or more comments / boosts than upvotes or favorites. It feels so organic and makes me realize how much these huge companies employ technics to pretty much force to interact the way they see fit.

It reminds me of that good old saying “you are not immune to propaganda”, well I guess neither I nor anyone is immune to psychological tricks either.

P.S. I also love the fact that since there isn’t pretty much any money involved, most opinions and interactions are genuine. Like, who is gonna pay this dude to advertise a book through BookWyrm? That increases immensely the odds that said person is being honest with their opinion of that book. It’s amazing.

  • JWBananas@startrek.website
    0·
    1 year ago

    The two biggest surprises I’ve had so far:

    1. Lack of federated login / single sign on. It seems bizarre in a land of federated instances to not have the identity provider decoupled (or even truly decentralized). Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. “Backed up” your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn’t exist today. And even if it were added, how do you validate?

    I hate to even suggest it just because of how much of a buzzword it has become. But blockchain feels like a possible answer to the identity problem. It would couple one’s identity to the network as opposed to the instance.

    That’s not to say that instance-level identities shouldn’t be allowed as well; but it would be nice to have the option. Right now one basically needs to sign up for separate accounts on as many instances as possible to prevent bad actors from posing as them. A universal ID would solve that.

    1. Lack of historical data. Are you the first subscriber to !bobswidgets@feder.icio.us through lemmy.world? Doesn’t matter if the original community had fiftyleven posts. You only get to see any created after you subscribe?
    • tal@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Instance goes away? Poof, there goes your identity. “Backed up” your data and want to import it into another instance? That functionality doesn’t exist today. And even if it were added, how do you validate?

      Normally, you deal with something like wanting to authenticate to many different entities via use of a public key. I suppose one could hypothetically have a mechanism to register a PGP or SSH pubkey with the network.

      But I don’t know how easy it would be for most users to handle the key management.

    • bbtai@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Lack of historical data. Are you the first subscriber to !bobswidgets@feder.icio.us through lemmy.world? Doesn’t matter if the original community had fiftyleven posts. You only get to see any created after you subscribe?

      This was suuuch a mystery for me as a noob, I didn’t know what was happening!

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      These are both definitely pain points. The good news is that the second issue can be dealt with manually, even though it’s annoying: you can copy and paste post links from the community on the server you’re browsing, throw it into the search form, and the remote post will get pulled in. This is a common convention in almost all fediverse platforms.

    • jrubal1462@vlemmy.net
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think you’re justified to be wary of the buzzwordiness of Blockchain though. For the 2 days I spent learning about what all this is before I signed up, every time I heard “de-centralized” I kept asking myself, “How sure am I that this isn’t some weirdly elaborate crypto scam?”

      Bonus fear: I was also concerned for a while that this was just going to be a refuge for hate groups who have been kicked off of major platforms. I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.