But can it really be addressed? Centralized systems will probably always be easier to use. For example, if you want to follow a lemmy community, it will be community@somewhere instead of just the community name, and it will be possible to have competing communities with the same same but different servers. This will always leave people confused, and it’s something inherent to the federated model
That’s part of the problem. Confusion like this just leads people to not engage with the platform. I suppose it is what it is and just enjoy this place while there are still people here.
To complement my previous comment, I believe the best course for us would be, instead of trying to address something that will never be better than in centralized networks, to try creating things that are great and exclusive to the fediverse. People can deal with minor inconveniences if they get some unique experience in exchange
Maybe having fediverse events, with each instance participating. Maybe even tournaments and championships, with each instance being like a team and having representative users, so that when we register in an instance, it won’t be simply entering a random server, but joining and rooting for a team.
That’s just a random idea. There are probably many other possibilities
These are good ideas. Hopefully something like that happens one day. In addition to events it would be nice if there were more in-person groups (eg for a class or local community group) that chose to connect online primarily through the Fediverse. You see that kind of thing happening with Discord. It would be good if we could do something similar here.
Open source content serving algorithms? We’d need to classify the content and have a server that recommends based on the algorithm. Also, user tracking to some degree (but maybe that can be handled locally?)
I don’t see how it couldn’t theoretically be done on the user’s end with the right client. Choose a certain feed and the client takes the information shared in the incoming post data like the title, description, community, vote count, and instance. Then isolates each post, classifies it, ranks it based on user preferences stored locally like upvote and downvote history, and the client then chooses the order of posts to show to the user. And if you wanted to go there you could even have a local simple machine learning model creating descriptions of image posts to cover everything.
Granted I actually know nothing about programming, but I don’t think you’d actually be processing that much data if you kept the algorithm simple. All it actually has to do is just choose a ranking based on metrics and keywords and assigned values. It also doesn’t have to achieve maximum retention or have single digit millisecond load time, it just has to give people a customized experience.
The problem is that all this overhead and maintenance would require some form of monetization, like injecting ads into the feed. Something like that has almost no demand right now, because the options we have for sorting are good enough and the people who want custom algorithms don’t know what federation means and aren’t paying. And honestly I think it might be better without it, because personally I don’t want lemmy to go mainstream and am happy with where it is now. I sort by top of the day in All, which basically crowdsources ranking anyways.
I think a simple ‘popular’ or ‘trending’ feed wouldn’t need user tracking. Or if it was really needed to be customized maybe users could opt into share what topics they are interested in when they sign up
Ease of use is one of the failings of the federation that needs to be addressed or it will never have a larger pool of users.
But can it really be addressed? Centralized systems will probably always be easier to use. For example, if you want to follow a lemmy community, it will be community@somewhere instead of just the community name, and it will be possible to have competing communities with the same same but different servers. This will always leave people confused, and it’s something inherent to the federated model
That’s part of the problem. Confusion like this just leads people to not engage with the platform. I suppose it is what it is and just enjoy this place while there are still people here.
To complement my previous comment, I believe the best course for us would be, instead of trying to address something that will never be better than in centralized networks, to try creating things that are great and exclusive to the fediverse. People can deal with minor inconveniences if they get some unique experience in exchange
How can we create something exclusive to the fediverse?
Maybe having fediverse events, with each instance participating. Maybe even tournaments and championships, with each instance being like a team and having representative users, so that when we register in an instance, it won’t be simply entering a random server, but joining and rooting for a team.
That’s just a random idea. There are probably many other possibilities
These are good ideas. Hopefully something like that happens one day. In addition to events it would be nice if there were more in-person groups (eg for a class or local community group) that chose to connect online primarily through the Fediverse. You see that kind of thing happening with Discord. It would be good if we could do something similar here.
Open source content serving algorithms? We’d need to classify the content and have a server that recommends based on the algorithm. Also, user tracking to some degree (but maybe that can be handled locally?)
I don’t see how it couldn’t theoretically be done on the user’s end with the right client. Choose a certain feed and the client takes the information shared in the incoming post data like the title, description, community, vote count, and instance. Then isolates each post, classifies it, ranks it based on user preferences stored locally like upvote and downvote history, and the client then chooses the order of posts to show to the user. And if you wanted to go there you could even have a local simple machine learning model creating descriptions of image posts to cover everything.
Granted I actually know nothing about programming, but I don’t think you’d actually be processing that much data if you kept the algorithm simple. All it actually has to do is just choose a ranking based on metrics and keywords and assigned values. It also doesn’t have to achieve maximum retention or have single digit millisecond load time, it just has to give people a customized experience.
The problem is that all this overhead and maintenance would require some form of monetization, like injecting ads into the feed. Something like that has almost no demand right now, because the options we have for sorting are good enough and the people who want custom algorithms don’t know what federation means and aren’t paying. And honestly I think it might be better without it, because personally I don’t want lemmy to go mainstream and am happy with where it is now. I sort by top of the day in All, which basically crowdsources ranking anyways.
I think a simple ‘popular’ or ‘trending’ feed wouldn’t need user tracking. Or if it was really needed to be customized maybe users could opt into share what topics they are interested in when they sign up