To the guy in here going “UX != UI!!!” Sure, but you can’t design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. “Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience.”

Lemmy has a “have our cake and eat it too” problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:

• Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and

• All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn’t matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.

In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn’t.

First there’s the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the “join one server, access all of them” an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to “where do we draw that line?” is “somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there.”

It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn’t. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement “It’s a different platform depending on who you are” on a monolithic service.

All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can’t browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. ‘Show me everything on lemmy.sports’ or indeed ‘show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.’ You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren’t a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn’t.

If it does matter, we shouldn’t have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

If it doesn’t matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of [email protected] and [email protected] coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

I don’t think you can have both at the same time.