this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It'll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
exactly.
and I am even gonna question whether that is a good thing for this use case. I get that it's cool for the idealists and techy folks. decentralized and all that.
but for exchanging links and discussing them, what an aggregator is supposed to be, you just want everything in one place. that is what people asking for a super instance mean. there is just too much friction to get there, imho.
in the side bar on my instance-of-choice, there is a link to a community browser. but if you click on a community on a different instance it sends you to that instance. i.e. you are logged out. so you cannot just click 'subscribe'. You have to go back to your own instance > communities > all > start typing > now you can finally subscribe.
ain't nobody got time for that!
For what it’s worth, there is an issue on staying on the same instance when clicking on a different instance’s community and dessalines agreed with the concept, so we might be seeing a change there soon.
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Great description. Im stealing that one
Pardon my confusion since I'm new to the fediverse as well, but isn't every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
Nah those are like sibling instances. I'm talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.
Just thinking out loud, haven't really fleshed out the idea yet.
Yeah, I think I get it - there's a bunch of smaller gaming@ kind of things, you're talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?
Yeah, like multireddits!
That already exists. ATM, the thing you're confusing it with is that there are 4-5 "gaming" subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it'll look like this instance "Technology@Beehaw.org" (p.s. I'm accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
I guess its just a natural progression of being absorbed by other communities that are larger.
I don't think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don't have to think about different instances most of the time. I've only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren't already familiar with it is:
The all for default is actually an admin setting (for users not signed up)