I decided to give it a try over the weekend on a road trip, through the apps Organic Maps and Go Map!! I really liked Go Map!! except that it crashes occasionally, and won’t restart until your reinstall it :( loosing all the GPS tracks and unsubmitted data :(( If it was more stable, I’d recommend it to everyone.
looks like https://lemmyverse.net/ is doing a decent job with indexing at the moment. I do honestly feel that indexing should take place on every instance, since each instance has a unique position in the network, and the indexing parameters/ranking algorithms could be under per-instance control rather than an outside third party.
I really like the idea. There one major issue that I see currently, and that is discoverability. It takes some real effort and time to explore things outside of your own instance. I think the federation of pre-federation content will be important for discoverability, since the foundation of a community is in it’s ranking of posts, which takes time and interaction. Right now, votes, comments, and most posts pre-federation on another instance are just not reachable.
I believe this problem can be solved, and there are a lot of motivated developers here, so I’m all in on lemmy.
The internet is a series of tubes.