What do you think about centralised clients?
One thing that bluesky did very well was abstracting the decentralisation (i know, its not really decentralised, bear with me) was having "apps" be centralised. What if we just pointed people towards a lemmy.app thing and that had a server as default?
Alexandrite.app does this, but it defaults to lemmy.world which is a bit of a dealbreaker.
Edit: By "app" I mean client.
I assumed most apps already do this? I believe the voyager app defaults to lemm.ee now because .world is large
Yes, some do, but I was referring to a website.
I'd say this is unlikely to work out. It mainly combines the downsides of two approaches. The centralization will make it less free and diverse and gives power to few people, while the decentralization adds unnecesary complexity. Since at that point it's mainly one large instance, but that has to send out loads of network traffic to very few people at other places to keep them in the loop. At that point, why not make it 100% centralized? That'd make programming and maintainance way easier.
Because then interoperable services could be made.
I think interoperability works with centralized services as well. They can offer an API for other services to hook into. Like Reddit had different apps, bots, tools... You can connect your software to the Google cloud, even if it's made by a different company... I think interoperability works just fine with both models, at least on the technical side.
hahah lets have a centralized app... but not like that!
kinda proving the reason right there... who gets to be 'default'?
Why not have the default be random, and if you don't like the one given, you can randomize again or type your own.
Well, its a centralised app to a supposedly decentralised network. The underlying network isn't decentralised by design. If you were to treat every bluesky pds as an instance, it would be very similar.
Also, you can take inspiration from something without copying it exactly.
Honestly it's a hard topic and I keep changing my mind on it. But currently this is my view:
If you point everyone to one place decentralization loses the meaning. I think people need to learn what decentralization is. It's an important issue to be honest and people have to be on board knowing what they are doing. It will be hard for sure but otherwise if a new centralized competitor comes into town, why wouldn't they switch if they don't care?
At the moment twitter is the most affected social media but people has to understand that this isn't just about twitter or reddit or whatever but about our rights to choose and decide where we want our data and who handles that. If people don't know the system they won't be aware of the issues.
With the Fediverse I've seen a lot of people worried about privacy and so on because they have to choose and suddenly they think about all the consequences. That's a good thing that hopefully will make them think twice about joining the next new centralized system.
Decentralization is good. Having a default instance is bad.
I've been using phtn.app, which defaults to lemm.ee.
Though I think a big difference between the fediverse/activitypub and bluesky/atproto is authentication. If you want a centralized app, you gotta have a centralized identity server. Otherwise you're freely giving your login credentials to a random server, which we as a society decided was a bad idea.
I can see a possible solution involving OAuth, which I believe Mastodon is able to support. See the relevant GitHub issue at LemmyNet/lemmy#1368
Yeah, bluesky and mastodon both use oauth.You can also give your username and password to a bluesky app, and until recently, a mastodon one.
you’re freely giving your login credentials to a random server, which we as a society decided was a bad idea.
Hey! I never agreed to that! I love playing fast and loose with internet security. You KNOW this about me! And I'll stop giving my super secure password of Password1 to insecure servers when my heart stops beating.
You kind of point out the problem. Which instance should be the default? Some would say lw, but you already discounted that.
Well, one that can handle the load. Lemmy.world is struggling as is.
People who fit the Lemmy.world and Hexbear atmospheres should really go to the instance they fit in and not the other.
Same for German and French speakers.
Queer people require more attentive protection.
Canadians, Australians and Brits on their own instance is cool.
Same for scientists.
Wait a minute...
I think this could work if it was a kind of demo instance that after some weeks or so would show increasingly annoying popups to switch to another instance.
The official Mastodon app kinda follows that idea with mastodon.social, just that the annoyance isn't intentional but a result of their bad moderation and thus spam problem.
Seems dangerous, people might just leave the platform all together
I don't think that's a serious problem as people that have so little interest that they leave because of that, would stop using it anyway sooner rather than later.
Of course the migration needs to be at least as easy as on Mastodon. Lemmy is still far from that.
Mastodon.social has a "spam problem" because they're the largest target. We're lucky it's them because they're one of the few instances with the resources to take on the problem. They've also contributed a ton - in tools and strategies - to help other instances deal with the problem.
If what you mean by centralized apps is apps having a default website, or a hard-coded website that it accesses, then that's also going to lead to centralizing the website.
The fediverse is just the web. It's not really suited to an app-first model of operation. Like, imagine having a blog-viewer app that only let you read one blog. We see this kind of behaviour from the business world, and people kind of hate it.
The only reason it would be different here is if the network collapses, and if it does, it's going to collapse into lemmy.world.
Which, apparently, is a "deal breaker".
Which, apparently, is a “deal breaker”.
Half of the posts on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com are about hexbear or .ml
The other half is about LW
hexbear: 1.9k users per month .ml: 2.3k users per month lemm.ee: 3.8k users per month .world: 17.2k users per month
Unwanted centralization is a fair enough complaint, but honestly us normies are mostly just... normaling.
I meant one like bluesky, it has a default instance, but you can login with another.
