This is a follow-up to Tim Chambers’ “The Seven Deadly UX Sins”, in which we collaboratively review where and how the network has improved over the past six months, with a lot of different initiatives to show for it!
Any reason why “Fediverse” means “Mastodon with some extras bolted on, but still largely only a Twitter clone” here?
Any reason why someone whom I remember as a Hubzilla veteran completely denies the existence of Hubzilla and its descendants and mostly even disregards Friendica?
At least on Hubzilla (which I know from personal experience because it’s my primary daily driver, believe it or not), these UX sins are partially an integral part of their concept and partly solved by their concept.
Sin #2: I, for one, do not want any algorithm of sorts to flush stuff onto my stream that I did not explicitly subscribe to. I only want to read what I want to read. I’m already busy curating, filtering and blocking stuff from those who decided to follow me, and whom I have to follow back. Also, getting rid of uninteresting cruft outside the scope of my channel coming from those whom I do give permission to send me their posts. I don’t also want to go and filter the stuff that others on my hub post or have subscribed to, especially because I can’t filter it by account/channel.
Besides, I only have one feed anyway. Public Hubzilla hubs do not have a pubstream at all, full stop.
That is, I don’t use my stream anyway. I vastly prefer the unread messages counter.
(Then again, Hubzilla doesn’t count non-technical folks who just came from the Twitter iPhone app as part of its target audience.)
Sin #4: On Hubzilla, private messages are private. Hubzilla has a thing called permissions.
Say, I send Alice a DM. I, as the starter of the conversation, only grant Alice and myself permission to view my start post as well as any comment.
Alice mentions Bob to pull him into the conversation. But Bob won’t see shit because Bob isn’t permitted to see shit.
I mention Bob to pull him into the conversation. But Bob won’t see shit because Bob still isn’t permitted to see shit. And even I, as the conversation starter and as the owner of the whole conversation, cannot change the permissions of anything in it after the fact.
Solved since 2012.
Sin #5: Hubzilla has full support for conversations as enclosed objects.
Like, I can use Hubzilla’s search to manually import some Mastodon toot from somewhere in the middle of a thread. Then Hubzilla will go and reel in the whole branch of the thread all the way back to the actual start post. And the replies to that toot. And eventually the other branches as well.
Someone replies anywhere in the conversation, and I will receive that reply.
The only things that could meddle with this are filters on my side, Superblock on my side or someone else having blocked me. Then I won’t get their messages, and I won’t get any follow-ups either.
This also means that, taking the same toot as an example, if someone up that branch in the conversation has fully blocked me, I can’t pull in their message. I can’t pull in any follow-ups either, nor can I pull in any follow-ups of these follow-ups, so I can’t pull in that particular toot either.
If something has a parent, and Hubzilla can’t get the parent, then Hubzilla refuses to get that something as well.
AFAIK, even Friendica has always been behaving like this. Only that Friendica is the only one in the family that hasn’t adopted FEP-171b “Conversation Containers” yet. It was invented on (streams), backported to Hubzilla and inherited by Forte.
Anyway, solved since at least 2012, if not 2010.
Sin #6: The whole family has very powerful search, including full-text search, since Mistpark’s inception 16 years ago. It’s part of their philosophy and culture.
Also part of the philosophy and culture on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte: You don’t want your stuff to be discoverable? Then don’t make it public in the first place. Likewise with quote-posts: You don’t want anyone to quote-post your stuff? Then don’t make it public. Public equals fair game. Deal with it, or restrict the permissions on it.
This, again, is where permissions come into play.
Solved since at least 2012.
Sin #7: This, again, implies that everyone in the Fediverse wants content to be sent to them on a silver platter while, at the same time, not having access to groups in some way or another.
I can understand that Mastodon users want that because the concept of curating their timeline is alien to them. After all, they barely have the means to do so. And in fact, many Mastodon users randomly follow thousands of Fediverse actors to get the same deluge of uninteresting stuff in their timeline that they’re used to from Twitter, hoping that something interesting pops up in-between. At the same time, the uninteresting stuff drowns the interesting stuff because nobody on Mastodon will ever scroll through all their unread content.
Also, sadly, this shows that the lack of groups is the default in the Fediverse because Mastodon neither has groups of its own nor really supports groups in any way.
I dare say that (streams) could be the champion of content discovery, all without shoving unwanted content down users’ throats. Not only does it have full support for groups, but it has a Facebook-style directory that lists actors from all across the Fediverse as far as it’s aware of them. And I myself am surprised about just how many of them a fairly young (streams) server with about a dozen channels can know.
You can even filter for groups, and then you get them all: Lemmy communities, /kbin and Mbin magazines, PieFed communities, Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums with and without ActivityPub, (streams) groups with and without ActivityPub, Forte groups if there were any, nodeBB subforums, Flipboard magazines, you name it, it’s all there. Join with 1 click, adjust the contact settings if you wish, there you go.
Essentially, what Friendica needs a centralised website for, (streams) has built into each server, reachable from each channel. On 'roids.
If that’s too difficult for you, then Facebook is too difficult for you.
Solved, too, unless the declared goal is for literally everything in the Fediverse to become a better Twitter. Including the stuff that’s already better than Twitter because its concept and philosophy is to not be like Twitter at all.
Specifically regarding the instance chooser point: I like the idea of a rotating cast of high uptime, low barrier instances, but in seeing current Lemmy cross-instance drama, I find myself wondering how best to navigate that.
For context, here’s a bit about my own Lemmy journey: when I signed up after looking for Reddit alternatives, I looked through the instance list, saw a few that looked appealing, and ultimately decided on SJW because it promised that shit would, indeed, just work. I joined via the mobile site in a mobile browser, with no idea yet about any of the apps or a lot of things, I spent a while playing around. In the process, I Ducked around and found out that Beehaw had defederated from SJW due to trolling issuws. Uh-oh! What did that mean? Was there going to be a bunch of stuff I was missing? Worse, had I accidentally joined a Bad Instance that was going to make everyone immediately make assumptions about my values when the only real values that had factored into my choice were “pls make it work?” Were people going to think I was a troll?
As it happens, I did some further research and found that Beehaw was an instance that favored a heavily moderated, tightly knit community that was somewhat defederation-happy towards more easily joined instances because of trolling potential. Okay. Their prerogative, and I get it, but not anything that needs to make me change instances. Cool.
So anyway, there’s been a whole lot of Controversy and Discourse about Lemmy.world and its main moderator recently. There have been defederations. Lemmy.world is one of the big, newbie-appealing instances, and in fact, the enshittification subreddit specifically links to Lemmy.world instead of join-lemmy.org.
So, how would we want to deal with a situation like this for rotating servers? Do we have best practices and guidelines in place for if a controversy emerges about an instance in rotation? Do we have some kinds of rules about moderation in eligible instances so that moderators who are found to be a problem through some process can be replaced to maintain the stability of the instance? What about rules for server sign-up policies? For example, reddthat.com allows sign-ups without email addresses, and I believe it’s the instance I just saw get defederated earlier from a large instance due to that extremely open sign-up policy leading to trolls.
I know the Fediverse does support instance migration in some form, but it honestly seems a bit confusing to me as a beginner, and something I’d rather avoid. Also as a beginner, joining an instance and spending hours trying to get acclimated, only to realize you’ve picked a Bad Instance and need to move, is possibly even more disheartening than going through a long list of instances in the first place, IMO.
I definitely agree that the long list of instances that new folks need to go through is a barrier to entry, just noting an additional consideration for discussion.
If you ever need to move instances, go to https://sh.itjust.works/settings and export the settings. Then in your new instance, import the settings. You’ll be following all the same communities as before, same blocks, etc. Settings exported from Lemmy can be imported into PieFed too.
The real bummer is when you invest a lot of time and effort into creating then building up a community on the wrong instance. You can just make a new comm and tell everyone to follow it but making this kind of moving more high-fidelity is high on my list.
Thank you; that’s really good to know!
But yes, it sounds like community migration is a real need.
Piefed has migration community https://piefed.social/post/667045
Hrm, it looks from the comments like it’s still kind of janky, but definitely a step in the right direction!
The post is one year old, it improved a bit since then
That’s good to hear!
I think 1 modifications fix this: User migration via Lemmy federation. When you can migrate from Instance to instance with old profile (comments, posts and all another) what instance you choice right now don’t importand.
Sean proposed something more ambitious: identity-first onboarding, where you import your social graph and content before choosing a server. The idea: set up a “pre-identity” that pulls in your posts and connections from other networks, then pick a server that fits
https://fediverser.network/ has exactly this. The missing piece was (still is) that no lemmy admin that I talked to bothered to integrate with it.
Regarding timeline turmoil and content discovery mirage, Piefed’s personal feeds and comments consolidation across cross posts definitely helps.
The formatting, style, cadence and tone feel very AI to me. The authors seem like real people with real history and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, the topic and status summarization is genuinely interesting whether it’s AI or not, but it’s hard not to feel a bit sus reading it.
You know, you’re not the first person to say that about something I wrote. Neither of us use general AI, and I make a point to avoid all of those tools to do things “the old fashioned way”.
It could be due to me being neurodivergent, or it could be that a certain kind of writing got slurped up by AI and that’s the default style now. I don’t know.
I work hard on everything I write.
If it helps, I definitely didn’t think it was AI even after that comment primed me to consider it. There were one or two parts where I went “this is a pattern I see in AI, but mostly that’s because it’s a common writing structure in the stuff AI was trained on.” I am also ND, though.
But also, it annoys me so deeply how many common things in human writing that AI picked up specifically because humans used it are now considered hallmarks of AI. Like, I get it, but also, don’t fuck with my em-dash.
From us, Dad! AI learned it from watching us!!
i’ve read that ND people do get mistaken a lot for AI in writings! i feel you.
I believe you, and I feel for you. The saddest part about AI is how it has tainted all high-effort, carefully organized work to the point that it makes it hard to distinguish between the most trustworthy content and the least trustworthy. We need better tools for information provenance. Like I said, the first thing I did was look into your backgrounds to try to understand “is this some AI slop bot or a real person with a real brain” and everything I looked at suggested it being legit and that’s why I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. But that doubt is everywhere nowadays. It’s rough out there.
It’s very well written. This is just AI affecting how people view well-organized, nicely-formatted, and clear writing these days. Thanks for keeping us updated on the progress of the fediverse and for doing it so thoroughly!
If it doesn’t look and smell and feel like a tweet, it’s considered “most certainly AI slop” nowadays.
Welcome to 2026.
Ah, I was going to ask whether you happen to read a lot of AI generated text since that could have obv influenced your style
No, I just tend to break up my thoughts into different segments and structures, because otherwise the whole thing feels like I’m just rambling about a bunch of stuff.
I can see why you’d say that because of the headings and the bullets. But I checked it and it’s human.
