I tried out a growing Reddit alternative, Lemmy, for a week, and its clear that federated apps aren't ready to replace Reddit yet.

Compared to established, age-old platform? Yes, we’re less developed. But do you know what’s even worse? Corporate greed! Rest assured, we’ll improve and mature over time.

  • Myro@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    Yes, discoverability is a large weakness of federate systems. As I understood it:

    • Instances host communities
    • You can access communities from other instances
    • To find a community hosted on another instance via search, at least 1 user has to have explicitly interacted with that community (search for it using the full name including instance name)
    • This registers it to your ‘home’ instance
    • This means, if no one searched for it explicitly, you won’t find it and won’t know it even exists.

    Second, due to instances being separate, there can be multiple variations of the same community. For example, a community “Technology” could exist on 10 different instances and is entirely independent from any other with the same name.