Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.

Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.

  • lemm1ngs@lemmy.mlOP
    5·
    3 years ago

    You are correct I need to spend more time here.

    Realistically most people are not going to run an instance . Blocking does become a problem when you dont run an instance because most do some blocking or are blocked. Even if you run an instance at some point for any reason it could also be blocked.

    Yes my rant is not solely targeted at lemmy put mainly Matrix because that is what I use. I should probably look more at mastodon and some others too. Federation has a lot of spins on the technology.

    Its nice that you still get involved with users here, the matrix devs are also quite easy talk to. Have you considered how lemmy might intergate with other federations? I did mention in another post someone was developing forums on matrix. Hummingbard I think its called. I have wondered if chat and forum could be combined in an interesting way, such that they could both possibly flow together but be seperated by alternate uis or view modes. On matrix often discussions can take a forum type format and style with conversations having days or many hours between replies. It would be great if those could end up in more permanent threads.

    It may be worth reaching out to matrix and element and seeing if some crossover can occur or even intergration. Their $30million and german health sector selection is a lot of potential dev work to be done.

    Thanks nutomic!

    • nutomic@lemmy.ml
      5·
      3 years ago

      I think instance blocking is pretty transparent, you can see the list of allowed and blocked instances under /instances. If admins do something you dont like, thats when you choose another instance.

      Its funny that you mention how i “still get involved with users here”, because Lemmy is still really small when you compare it to Matrix or Mastodon (16k total users, less than 1k active in the last month).

      Matrix uses a completely different protocol, so I dont think federation with them is realistic. And we definitely have enough work to do on Lemmy itself. But it might be possible to write a chat app using activitypub, or even as a Lemmy frontend as described in this post.

      • lemm1ngs@lemmy.mlOP
        2·
        3 years ago

        I am not arguing its not transparent just its not ideal. I think matrix users are way over stated.

        Thanks