this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.
Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.
I fully agree that it's simpler to create an account on a centralized website.
In my understanding, your comments have to be stored on a server whatever the centralization. The fact that you can choose on which server they are stored is the decentralization.
Your ID doesn’t need to be tied to any given server. You can move around and change your “home” server at will. Or if preferred you could stand up your own server for your usage, hold your identify on there, and still engage with the rest of Lemmy / fediverse.
It’s less a design mistake and more a technical constraint. A users identify exists as, at a minimum, a database entry. That database needs to live somewhere that the various fediverse servers can talk to. But you have complete freedom in where that database entry is, and can change your mind later.
So it already doesn’t matter if you’re on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server - they all federate with each other (to varying degrees but that’s a slightly different conversation)
How does that work? I know that it's an option on Mastodon, but from what I understand, this is yet to be implemented into Lemmy.
Edit: spelling
It’s something of a manual process for Lemmy right now, you’d need to set up on another server and manually add your communities but the point is you can still “move home” and still interact with the same communities and people. If you don’t like having your stuff on Reddit, on the other hand, your options are put up with it or no longer be able to be part of that community.
So if you join a fediverse server of any flavour and the admins reveal themselves to have view incompatible with your own, or the server goes to shit, or it just has to shut down due to lack of funds or whatever you don’t get locked out of the places you have been hanging out in.
That's not moving your identity though, that's creating a new identity that subscribes to the same communities. There's an important distinction there, there's no way to clearly identify yourself as you having moved, which conversely also means there's no way to be assured that some other account is not an impersonator.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to know that if a server were to disappear that I could just create an account on another one but it's still a distinction that causes some issues today that will need to be ironed out in future.