In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:
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Lemmy needs DIDs.
No, not dissociative identity disorder, Decentralized Identities.
The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it's up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.
Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive "might not make it", and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.
This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn't a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.
*Banning the account could create the same issue.
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Communities need to federate too.
Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.
Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.
What do you think?
EDIT: There's been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.
It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.
I don't see the big problem in 1. Compare it to e-mail. If you want to switch provider you have to backup and restore your emails if you want to.
Nobody bats an eye that amiladresses contain a maildomain but with Lemmy everyone is used to the reddit way. Give it some time, people will get used to it.
The syncing and federation problems we are experiencing right now will get solved in the future, people will get used to the new naming scheme.
Point 2 is a great idea btw.
Notice how everyone pretty much uses gmail? If gmail goes down you lose access to everything, but it won't because it's google and they have money to throw at problems. That's not true for Lemmy (and we don't want that because it leads to Reddit 2.0 where all power is centralized).
There is also the additional issue of defederation, not just your instance stability. Like if you happen to be one of the 30k users on lemmy.world, or any of the smaller ones that got cut off from Beehaw because you trusted the "it doesn't matter where you make your account, it's all shared in the fediverse!" - if there's a constant risk Gmail decides to block all Hotmail users one day, creating a Gmail account in the first place seems like the safer bet.
Absolutely! Don't fool yourself into thinking this will be the only time this happens. Some instance owners will never be willing or able to manage their servers as well as the big players, and that means bad actors can creep into other instance through them!