I shouldn’t need a third party to solve that AND it doesn’t solve the issue that indexing is done by instance meaning that we can’t search by adding “Lemmy” to our search like we do with Reddit…

Hosts could choose to host NSFW content or not, right now they have the exact same issue anyway so the current situation is no better…

That’s why you make the backend available to all to develop a front end, but there’s a default option just called Lemmy that helps solve the indexing and getting people started issue. If the Lemmy default option becomes shit the data is still available and something else becomes the default option.

A bit like Jerboa is the official app, but everyone can develop an alternative… Get rid of the instances and make all content available no matter where you sign up from and let the users curate their feed, you get rid of the admins completely, only moderators continue to exist.

Even if it’s indexed, there’s no single website to search for so even if I add “Lemmy” to help, it won’t look for content where Lemmy isn’t mentioned.

The mistake that was made was making the decentralization something that affects the front end. If the backend was decentralized and the front end was a single default website with people being able to create alternatives (but everyone being guaranteed access to all the content), that wouldn’t be an issue. We could tell new users “Sign up on Lemmy.com and if you decide you don’t like the UI just choose an alternative and use the same credentials to sign in.” No one would know you’re using a different UI, all content would be searchable by adding site:lemmy.com to your query.

Exactly and for the same reason Lemmy won’t become as big as it has the potential to become. “Join Lemmy!” “How?” “Go to one of hundreds of websites and join and you’ll have access to the Lemmy content the admin decided you could have access to… Oh and people logging in from those other sites might not have access to the content on your site so you might not be able to interact with a big chunk of users unless it’s on a website that is connected to both your site and the site your site isn’t connected to so choose the site you create your account on wisely! Makes sense?”

Also, even if you find results through searching, it sucks that it probably brings you to an instance that isn’t yours so you have to figure out a way to open the link from your own instance in order to post in the discussion… That is, if you actually can from the instance you’re signing in from!

If people don’t want a Reddit clone they’ve come to the wrong place

And that’s an issue with the instance system, losing access to tons of communities you have no problem in because you happened to piss off the instance’s admin in a community they frequent? That’s completely ridiculous.

You just made me realize that I have been banned from some of the communities over there while never having posted on them, mods are reading conversations in other communities and preemptively banning people…

If it works the same way then nothing will be solved. That’s why I keep saying it, the hosting needs to be decentralized but the rest needs to work like an admin-less Reddit, moderators would have their community/ies but they wouldn’t be able to ban you altogether and you wouldn’t depend on an admin to decide what you can and cannot see, you would block the communities you don’t want in your feed yourself.

And only post on your own instance and talk with users of your own instance… Might as well just send emails to your friends at that point…

Kind of funny how the privacy crowd is big on Lemmy but it skips over the fact that all of its Lemmy data is hosted on the machines of people that have no accountability…

You lose the communities you were subscribed to, the block list you build…

And you still lost all your previous data and you’re still dependent on one point of failure, it’s just in your own hands now.

It’s also a question of wanting to make the website popular, if you don’t care about getting more people to leave centralized websites then sure the current solution works, if you want more and more users to join then the experience needs to be user friendly and right now it isn’t, even as a tech savvy person I had a hard time figuring out how to add communities from other instances to my subscribed list and I couldn’t figure out why some would never confirm I was subscribed.

Social Media needs to be decentralized behind the scene, users must not feel it.

It’s already a thing on Lemmy at the moment and it’s not as if people were talking about the various instances as separate websites when they talk about Lemmy.

It would be fairly easy to have a post info page that mentions what servers (including redundancies) the content is hosted on.

Anyway, the ideal solution would be that NSFW content has its own website (LemmXXX! I’m a genius) separate from the rest so as not to potentially create legal issues.

It’s an issue with the current method too and hosts could decide if they host NSFW content or not with the risk and curation responsibilities that entails if they do (as we can see with Pornhub you can get in trouble for hosting porn stuff that isn’t CSAM).

But then you’re still stuck with some kind of central authority, just let people decide what they want to block from their feed instead of relying on an admin to do part of the job for them.

Right now my admin could decide to defederate from a bunch of instances and there’s nothing I could do about it except create a new account elsewhere. Same if they accidently die, all my data will be lost when the server is shut down.

Have a single website with decentralized servers and triple redundancy based on server location? You’re pretty much bullet proof and it becomes much more interesting for small players that don’t want to get too involved… Just give whatever space you’ve got available to the cause and let the software do its thing.

As I mentioned in another discussion, the fediverse needs to work like crypto mining pools, you join the pool of servers that share the data load, but you’re just there for data redundancy, users don’t “sign up to your server”, they “sign up to the website” that all servers are hosting together, if you go offline another server has your data so the website never goes down in the end.

I think it should be like joining a mining pool, if you create a server you don’t have admin privileges like they exist here at the moment, you’re added to the pool of machines that stores info and users don’t choose a server at all, the servers communicate between themselves to make sure all info is backed up on at least three machines.

From the front end it looks like any equivalent private social media, one website for everything. On the back end side the servers are all over the place instead of in a couple data centers.

Server owners could decide to ban certain communities from storing info on their server, but that wouldn’t delete the community, it would just rely on being hosted elsewhere (hence the triple backup at all times) and users would be responsible for curating their own feed.

It would solve the issue of having to switch server if you disagree with the admin’s decision and would make the experience much more user friendly. Each new server would improve the stability of the whole network by taking part of the load and making sure that if one server is down, others have the same content available so no user can tell that there’s something wrong happening behind the scene.

It’s not that it’s not in a brick form, it’s also “not finished”… Around here there’s a small cheese maker that even sells it one step earlier in the preparation, so it’s like having just the small grains from cottage cheese, they serve it in its whey, still warm, people eat it with chips and it’s even more squeaky than the curds used for poutine!

It’s incomplete cheddar in fact! It’s way more salty too!