To me, it was the astounding amount of interactivity between the community.
At first I thought this was temporarily caused by the whole migration from the R site. But, just out of curiosity, I signed up to Mastodon and have enjoyed myself just as much as here.
Most of the Lemmy post’s / Mastodon toots have almost as much or more comments / boosts than upvotes or favorites. It feels so organic and makes me realize how much these huge companies employ technics to pretty much force to interact the way they see fit.
It reminds me of that good old saying “you are not immune to propaganda”, well I guess neither I nor anyone is immune to psychological tricks either.
P.S. I also love the fact that since there isn’t pretty much any money involved, most opinions and interactions are genuine. Like, who is gonna pay this dude to advertise a book through BookWyrm? That increases immensely the odds that said person is being honest with their opinion of that book. It’s amazing.
The two biggest surprises I’ve had so far:
I hate to even suggest it just because of how much of a buzzword it has become. But blockchain feels like a possible answer to the identity problem. It would couple one’s identity to the network as opposed to the instance.
That’s not to say that instance-level identities shouldn’t be allowed as well; but it would be nice to have the option. Right now one basically needs to sign up for separate accounts on as many instances as possible to prevent bad actors from posing as them. A universal ID would solve that.
Normally, you deal with something like wanting to authenticate to many different entities via use of a public key. I suppose one could hypothetically have a mechanism to register a PGP or SSH pubkey with the network.
But I don’t know how easy it would be for most users to handle the key management.
Regarding the first issue, you could check out https://hubzilla.org which has NomadicIdentity, but it still doesn’t solve it for ActivityPub. Maybe later.
I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple days, and I agree. There’s even the problem of duplicate "subs* popping up on other instances. Federation as it currently is seems to be something that works a lot better with a Twitter alternative than a Reddit one. There’s probably some tweaks that can be done to make it a more unified experience. I have some ideas, but I don’t think they’d work.
These are my suggestions, and I’m sure there’s a reason why they haven’t been done.
I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately since the Reddit migration started. I believe it could be solved at the client level at least. Unifying magazines over instances and behind the scenes pull in and follows twin magazines at other instances and presents them in a single abstract magazine.
There are probably reasons why you at the server level or user level want the low level community access and behavior we have today but judging of all comments and how we typically behave as humans I would say that is rather the unusual case not the mainstream.
Such users could easily then opt in at the instance level and everyone else looking for a more “centralized” experience can still have that through the client app.
No doubt it would take some work but I believe it is very doable given my understanding of the Activity Pub protocol and how it works today.
But you can also have multiple subs on reddit for the same topic. e.g. AI and ArtificialIntelligence. People choose the best one and they either stand or fall based on merit. Things will settle down.