What I like to call “glide texting” is when (on a phone) you put your finger on the first letter and drag your finger to the next letter and the next and so on without lifting your finger until you reach the last letter. Letters that are repeated (like in too) are just treated as one letter for this. Your phone will then “guess” what word could be represented by “what you just drew” and give you some options above the keyboard (3 for my phone) for alternatives in case things were guessed wrong. This requires your keyboard to support that feature (and the basic Android keyboard does support it). On earlier phones, the SwiftKey keyboard was used to do such things (that company was later on purchased by Microsoft by the way).

There are two issues I want to highlight with regards to glide texting.

First is where several words can be represented by one “glide text”. I feel (can’t prove) that the phone does use the context of your sentence to assist with word selection. However, you sometimes have to be annoyed and type out words letter by letter to get things entered.

The second issue is that your phone learns from you and from the “intelligent population”. If you type in a wrong spelling (perhaps by not entering in the last letter) then your phone “learns” that word and starts to use it when glide texting. Second is when a person glide texts incorrectly (for “hello”, instead of swiping over HELO they swipe over GWKO or BELO or something like that) and then that person taps the “Hello” entry for what that glide should mean. Now the phone starts thinking glide texts for a specific word (from anyone in the world) must mean some completely different word because the majority of people seem to indicate that.

Still, glide texting is usually a faster way to enter text on the phone. That being said, issues can be quite interesting when they do appear.

That second link is helpful. For instance, it shows an server which I thought was ran well ( startrek.website ) being about 1 million activities behind in content from Lemmy.world

https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=startrek.website&var-remote_instance=lemmy.world&from=now-32d&to=now

This means that the technology community here looks much different there. Here there are comments to our submissions. Shown there, the submissions seem to have no comments.

https://lemmy.world/c/technology

https://startrek.website/c/technology@lemmy.world

If a person there didn’t know better, they may think that Lemmy doesn’t have as much activity as it actually does.

Thanks for the information!

I’m not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I’m not sure if they can easily show that information either.

I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…

The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.

It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.

Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.

There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.

One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.

If you don’t know, Reddit updated their interface in February and made it worse by doing so. People who tolerated the older “new” interface can find a way to use that (at new.reddit) while the older interface is still there too (old.reddit).

Still, it seems like Reddit keeps making changes to drive away their older user base which hypothetically is drawing in new users (otherwise it seems a bit silly for them to be doing those changes).

Can I comment on Beehaw (or lemmyNSFW, but I’m at work so not going there right now) using this account I have at lemmy.world?

Beehaw, no. They defederated from Lemmy.world. More information is at https://lemmy.world/post/145337 (iffy formatting) and https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (easier to read). A bit more information is also at https://lemmy.world/post/149743

LemmyNSFW, yes. The answer is yes for most instances.

Is there a way to easily see which instances are defederated from others (or conversely which instances are connected)?

To add to what others are saying, there is a list that may be helpful. Let me explain it a bit though.

The list below shows various Lemmy instances in a table. An instance can block another instances (this is what they control). The instance can be blocked by someone else (which they can’t control). Either way, a block is in place so the two cannot communicate.

The column header BL specifies how many instances they are blocking. The column header BB says how many instances are blocking them.

If they have a high BL, they likely do not want to federate with many other instances which can be a drawback. If they have a high BB, that instance is likely acting in such a poor manner that nobody wants to interact with them. Basically, you may want to reconsider instances which have an excessively high BL or BB.

Note that there are pretty bad places out there so having a BL of 0 can be an issue as well. A BB of 0 may indicate that an instance is very new so nobody really knows about them yet.

The list is sorted by how many users are at an instance. If the instance has a high amount of users, the service is likely a higher quality service that can grow over time. Small services aren’t bad per say but they may eventually disappear or overload if too many people join them.

Like most things, this is just more information to help guide you in your decision making. The best decision is one that you make on your own after you do your own research.

Anyway, the list is below.

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/blob/main/README.md#all-lemmy-instances

Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues?

We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working. They want to easily register here and have a smooth experience. They cannot easily register because they need to know a few things (like where to register) and if their experience will be significantly lousy if they make any mistakes. This is for both people providing content (users) and people managing communities (moderators) who also need to know that their jobs won’t be significantly harder when they come over here.

Great work on the https://fediverser.network/ site! A simple guided pathway towards a great Lemmy instance (and perhaps a Lemmy instance which hosts many communities that they want to interact with) would be a welcome addition. Perhaps there could be a similar guided pathway for mods trying to find a great place to set up their community would be helpful as well.

I think that you would first want to have people using both services and annoyances/problems with one service will cause people to abandon the lousy place to use the better place.

That being said, the Lemmy instance I registered to had broken federation approximately half the time and was down for significantly long amounts of time as well. People interacting there had their comments take a long time to federate (only catching up during the rare times federation would work) and they had no idea that they were shouting into a closed box during that time. I’m not even addressing other federation issues such as this instance being blocked by another instance (Beehaw) which is causing some fragmentation.

Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”. You can create your community there as well. You then run into the “annoyances/problems” relating to your smaller instance and migrate to a more stable option… which is Reddit which you still use.

So while federation is a strength for Lemmy, it is also a weakness when it doesn’t work. Migrating people to Lemmy doesn’t tend to focus on migration to a specific server (like lemmy.world ) but focuses instead on migration to “Lemmy” which can be any random server under the sun (stable or not, reliable or overloaded, federating reliably or not). Once issues come up, the person could move to another Lemmy server or they can move back to Reddit… and I think many choose the Reddit option.

It doesn’t help that federation is a complicated topic to understand and the recommended new user approach to Lemmy is to join a tiny server where you are required to use federation and to hope that it is working (while also having no obvious indication if federation is working today or not). To use the email analogy, I get a “bounce back” email notice if my email being sent out cannot be delivered and I get that notice quickly. With broken federation, I have to do research and visiting external sites to determine if my message got through or if I am even receiving any new messages at all. People can get a little annoyed when things are mysteriously not working or when things “may be working or not, who knows?”.