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.
to me, it was surprising just how easy the fediverse was to understand if i stopped trying to think about it how i was taught to think by centralized platforms.
at first, i was really hesitant to migrate. i was confused by kbin, lemmy, mastodon, and especially the fediverse. i didn’t think i could ever understand it. i wasn’t confident in it. but, after a few hours of exploring, interacting, watching people talk about it and reading explanations, it clicked into place and suddenly made sense, a whole lotta sense. now, i am actually teaching others about what the fediverse is with little to no trouble and helping them migrate to kbin from reddit, and thats amazing. having tons of fun here! 👍
The two biggest surprises I’ve had so far:
- 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.
- 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?
Regarding the first issue, you could check out https://hubzilla.org which has NomadicIdentity, but it still doesn’t solve it for ActivityPub. Maybe later.
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.
Two positive surprise features which are very useful in long and complex comment chains:
Comments to other comments get a colored bar on the left. Color depends on indent which makes it easy to find comments of same ident even over long vertical distances.
Super long comment chains can be continued on the same page.
Federation and defederation has much more complex implications than I thought: lemmy.world: How the beehaw defederation affects us
