(Apologies for the long Post)
This post isn’t meant to throw shade at anyone or stir up drama, but I wanted to ask something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel that the Fediverse – and many platforms within it – can be somewhat super complicated, at least from the perspective of the average person?
As the saying goes, “Society can only move as fast as its slowest member.”
And honestly, I think the average user (myself included sometimes!) struggles with the way the Fediverse operates compared to more familiar centralized platforms.
Take Mastodon, for example.
It’s widely loved, and there’s a lot to admire about its decentralized, federated nature.
But for new users, the concept of picking an instance, understanding federation, knowing what happens if your instance goes down, etc. can be daunting.
Now compare that to something like Bluesky.
While Bluesky isn’t federated, it’s still decentralized thanks to its use of the AT Protocol.
Yet, it still manages to feel like a traditional, centralized platform in terms of usability, onboarding, and general experience.
Other examples abound, where certain Fediverse tools feel designed more for tech-savvy users than the “average Joe” who just wants to sign up, post, and connect seamlessly.
This brings me to the KISS principle:
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
For those unfamiliar, KISS is a design philosophy that emphasizes simplicity.
Complex systems, while often powerful, can be harder to understand, troubleshoot, and maintain.
It’s a reminder that sometimes the best path forward is the simplest one.
And I can’t help but wonder:
Could the Fediverse benefit from more simplicity in design and user experience?
I completely understand that the Fediverse’s complexity is often a result of its strengths:
decentralization,
choice,
openness,
and
privacy.
But is there a way to achieve these values while making the experience more approachable, as well as potentially simplified?
- What do you think? Can the Fediverse strike a balance between power and simplicity?
- Have you had moments where explaining the Fediverse to someone felt like explaining how email servers work instead of just sending an email?
- Do you think platforms like Mastodon could take cues from Bluesky or others when it comes to onboarding and user experience? Or is the current complexity a necessary trade-off?
Potential Simplification Strategies for the Fediverse
-
Unified Onboarding Process
- Description: Develop a standardized onboarding procedure that introduces users to key features and concepts of different Fediverse platforms, reducing the initial learning curve.
-
Cross-Platform Tutorials
- Description: Create detailed, interactive tutorials that cover the fundamental aspects of multiple Fediverse platforms, allowing users to quickly gain proficiency.
-
Simplified Instance Selection
- Description: Develop an intuitive instance selection tool that helps users find instances that match their interests and community standards, possibly based on user feedback and ratings.
-
Visual Federation Guides
- Description: Implement visual aids, such as infographics or flowcharts, that illustrate how federation works, helping users understand how content is shared across different platforms.
-
Universal Fediverse Account
- Description: Explore the possibility of a single account system that allows users to seamlessly log into multiple Fediverse platforms without needing to create separate accounts for each instance.
-
Standardized UI Elements
- Description: Encourage developers to adopt common user interface elements across Fediverse platforms, creating a more cohesive experience that helps users feel at home regardless of which platform they are using.
-
Community Support Hubs
- Description: Establish dedicated support communities that offer guidance, resources, and FAQs, making it easier for newcomers to find help without feeling overwhelmed.
-
User-Friendly Language
- Description: Simplify technical jargon and use more accessible language in platform interfaces and documentation to make them easier to understand for non-technical users.
-
Feedback Mechanisms
- Description: Implement easy-to-use feedback tools within platforms that allow users to share their experiences and suggest improvements directly to developers.
-
Mobile-Friendly Designs
- Description: Prioritize responsive and mobile-friendly designs to ensure users can easily navigate and interact with Fediverse platforms on various devices.
-
Gamified Learning Experiences
- Description: Introduce gamified tutorials that reward users for completing tasks and learning about different features, making the onboarding experience fun and engaging.
-
Streamlined Content Discovery
- Description: Enhance content discovery mechanisms by implementing smart algorithms that curate and recommend content based on user preferences, reducing the complexity of finding relevant posts.
By implementing these strategies, the Fediverse can move towards a more user-friendly environment that welcomes newcomers and supports them in navigating the diverse range of platforms available.
6 is never happening
Idk how simple it can get.
Go to website. Make account. Use it like anything else.
Not complicated. Lemmy users are not some Einstein-level genious, just everyday average people that spend 5 minutes doing search engine stuff.
without needing to create separate accounts for each instance.
Umm… thats not how it works. One account is the gateway to every instance (as long as it’s not defederated). I think you might need to do some googling. 😉
The first half of the sentence you quoted is:
Explore the possibility of a single account system that allows users to seamlessly log into multiple Fediverse platforms
So one account for a Lemmy instance, another for a Mastodon instance, another for a Friendica instance, another for Loops, another for PeerTube, etc.
But you can follow people on those platforms from one account. Multiple accounts is not required.
Lemmy users are above average intelligence, and that ain’t much to say, and if maybe young and idealistic. Dumbass users don’t typically land here.
Not hard to land here, but keep in mind, a great many people can’t read. Serious.
bluesky is still not decentralised. just having a protocol does not mean anyone use will use it. if bluesky is down, there’s no bluesky.
From what I can tell, Bluesky is both decentralized and federated in terms of the protocol and software, but in a practical sense, trying to run the whole thing independently doesn’t seem quite there yet.
The things that are easy to do are use a domain name as an identifier and host your own personal data server. Owning your own data is nice in theory, but being able to take it with you isn’t that valuable when there’s nowhere to go.
it has the potential to be both. until people running their own instance is commonplace, it won’t be either.
you can’t have decentralisation without federation, also iirc there’s problems with bluesky’s federation architecture so there’s syncing issues between instances
the main problem is that running an instance of the atproto stack is way complex, so nobody wants to do it.
It’s not really that complicated. In fact, it’s literally by design easier than the old 90’s “everyone in their own forum” where you literally had to sign up to each and every place to have a voice or a vote; now, you only need to sign-up to at best one instance.
In fact, I’d say much of the complains about complexity we see nowadays are part of the general appeal to anti-intellectualism that runs rampant on the modern internet. Most things should not be “fire and forget” for good reason, and the social internet, much like driving a car let alone a truck, is a good example why. It’s curious in that sense that you quote this:
As the saying goes, “Society can only move as fast as its slowest member.”
Before mentioning I’ve ever heard this anywhere where there’s decent people, so perhaps it’s something that’s told in KKK circles or the like. Like, this is so sorely and patently false it feels like an attempt at trolling. Society moves past the “slow” members and throws them under the proverbial progress bus all the fucking time. That’s what capitalism, collonnialism and consumerism is all about. A good society has to be slow, because it has to observe, think, evaluate and teach.
There are severe pain points still on the general fediverse experience and in some service / instance particulars. You make good point in mentioning a few of them such as the lack of unified onboarding, better guides (technical and visual) and quite definitively the discoverability problem. But I’d frown at some of the proposed solutions like “smart algorithms”
Yar. Simplify or die (I hope not)
Choosing an instance has gotta be culled. Can be reintroduced for users who get comfortable with the platform though perhaps. Or use external sources to determine a user’s default instance (like communities can try to earn Default credits for instance, then users will be defaulted to those instances).
Wonder if anybody tracking how much the funnel shrinks at the “choose an instance” step.
Potential Simplification Strategies for the Fediverse
Courtesy an LLM eh? 😉
Choosing an instance has gotta be culled.
The trouble with that is having many instances is the core trait that makes it a federated system.
There are certainly ways to de-emphasize that step during onboarding; an onboarding site that picks an instance from a curated set of general-purpose instances would be a good way. Bad ways include joinmastodon.org making mastodon.social the default, and join-lemmy.org asking a couple questions and presenting a list.
i downloaded the official mastdodon app and chose by the rules of the instance, now i use megaladon and toot.io is federated with facebool…
Is the federation so hard to grasp? It’s basically your website having friends and you see what the users in the friend site say.
I think some of you don’t realize just how simple you need to make things for the general populace. They are 💯 brain damaged 😅
I’m fine with them getting filtered. This place already has no shortage of fools.
But it does have a shortage of content. So there’s a trade-off.
This place has the same amount of high-quality content and intelligent conversation as reddit. Not proportion, amount.
I think the fediverse is friendly enough. Instead of competing with corporations with streamlined experiences, develop power user tools that actually improve the content on the platform. Like I do want a powerful fediverse search tool, but it doesn’t need to be built into every server.
The hardest part for me was figuring out how to choose and register for an instance, and those websites have been improved since I signed up. I understood pretty easily that federated instances were linked so I could access stuff across all of them through an account on one. Choosing a client app isn’t too difficult either, just shop for features. The scene: Lemmy is full of commies, Mastodon is threatened by Threads, R.I.P. kbin, Bluesky aspires to be better Twitter. So basically, choose instance, choose client, curate feed, start posting (optional?). Did I miss anything?
A few ways to contribute to move these ideas forward:
If you know one of either Python or HTML+CSS then you can start contributing to PieFed (explanation, which is much easier than learning Rust (+ also JavaScript) for Lemmy.
There is just so much low-hanging fruit there - like in Lemmy why can I only see upvotes separately from downvotes when viewing the web UI from a mobile device but not a desktop one, and even then for posts those values are below the post, alongside the actual voting voting, whereas for comments that identical information is way up above the content in a whole separate area, sometimes on the right of the screen but other times to the left. Ofc there are apps but those fall behind too, as new changes come out.
Similarly, Sublinks uses Java, and Mastodon uses mostly Ruby on Rails and JavaScript (description).
Or Mbin already combines Lemmy + Mastodon, written in PHP (requirements).
Or make a community on an existing platform, and invite people to post and join as you do the work of moderation.
Or help with funding bc server hardware and networking isn’t free. Or start one of your own and invite people to join.
Lots of work is happening. Lots more remains to be done.
The fediverse isn’t that complicated, if you really care about ownership and control and the portability of data when it comes to using a social network.
The fediverse is just complicated enough that it is a big enough barrier to keep people that don’t care about those things from getting on boarded usually. There isn’t really a good way to make those factors less complicated with out compromising them for the whole reason people currently prefer the fediverse.
However there are some other pain points that could be addressed that I think will make things simpler for those who aren’t privacy/tech/decentralization focused.
Starter packs for one. Allow instance hosts to maintain starter packs for people to follow if they choose during the onboarding process. A lot of people complain about having empty or inactive feeds. Starter packs solve that easily. Especially if there is a repo for communities to submit their own starter packs as well.
Better discoverability. I know some people don’t want search to improve but it’s pretty hard to find people through actual Mastodon search. I dont know if it’s just do to a lack of users and content or if that’s something that truly needs improving. But basically my follows are usually found off platform and then manually followed or I follow someone I discover via a hashtag.
Is it really that complicated?
Ni, but the UX is shit, and the value proposution is so poorly thought out that you can’t really sell people on it who aren’t already ready to buy in.
Everyone makes the same mistake: Diminish the home instance, paper over the heterogeneous nature of things, and try to make it look like centeralized social media. It breaks the user experience.
Ni, but the UX is shit, and the value proposution is so poorly thought out that you can’t really sell people on it who aren’t already ready to buy in.
- no ads
- no sponsored posts
- officially supported mobile clients
- clean Web interface
- transparency on moderation actions
Yeah, I think the Fediverse would benefit massively from that. And with onboarding etc, there are quite some low hanging fruit, which would be easy to tackle. And I think some of the complexity of federation could be abstracted away with a different cross-post mechanism and a different way communities are handled. It’s not super easy to program that, there are a lot of consequences to consider… But with the right approach that could be made easier for the user.
I’m not sure if I like gamification. But a few tooltips here and there wouldn’t hurt.
If someone is too dumb to figure out the Fediverse, isn’t it better if they just stay on Reddit or Twitter or whatever?
Kinda seems like it could be a decent filter of sorts.
There really seems to be fewer idiots here (I’m here though, sorry Fediverse).
