I haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.

The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn’t be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn’t host their own instance unless they want a hobby.

Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.

Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.

Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.

Corporate welfare is a problem in all capitalist countries

If people took existential threats seriously, we should immediately devote all our resources into escaping the simulation to prevent it from being turned off. But yeah… we’d ignore it and go back to TikTok

One person posting the same thing to multiple communities is bad etiquette, whether the stated purpose of those communities is the same or not. Anyone who does this should be shamed, blocked and banned. Find the biggest and most relevant community and post it there, don’t spam.

I focus on comments rather than posts, but if you care about finding new links then I agree that duplicate communities is a problem. But it’s not the biggest problem on the platform, and obviously while instances are independent there’s no way to force a solution. Communities have merged, but it’s usually small communities on small instances dying as their users move to a large community on a large instances. This is a disaster for decentralization, everything needs to be as spread out as possible across instances.

The multiple communities doesn’t bother me, I just join both and usually don’t notice the difference. It’s a better problem than all the communities being on lemmy.world which defeats the point of federation.

Each instance is it’s own server, then it has many communities which are created by users. Ideally we spread the communities across instances, but unfortunately most of the big communities are clustered on the big instances, because finding communities on small instances is hard.

Just make it like multireddits on Reddit. It allows you to collate multiple communities into one feed.

They aren’t talking about a programming language, just the graphical tools in the programs you already have.

If you are interested in simple automation for your computer, learn python. If you are interested in simple automation in a browser, learn JavaScript.

The nice thing is, if an instance wanted to put in the effort they could totally make an algorithm. We will have to grow a lot before it’s worth the bother to make a good one, but it’s totally possible.

In the case of social network like this, bigger generally is better for the users. The thing that made Reddit great was that whatever your niece interest, there was a community of thousands of other interested people. There was so much information and advice on whatever obscure topic.

There’s a reason why there’s only around 10 really popular social networks and it’s certainly not that those platforms are any good. The network effect is important.