this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Umm, all of what you are describing already exists and is basically how lemmy works. The local feed would always be empty on your newly setup instance if course, precisely because it is the "local" feed. If you want to see the feed of all the instances you are federating with, that's "all" (or whatever it's called on your specific client).
The all feed only populates data that your local instance is aware of. So if you have a new instance that isn't aware of any communities, you're all feed is empty.
Ok fair enough, but that isn't exactly a hard hurdle to overcome.
It really is though. You have to know about which communities to subscribe to to get them federated on your instance. Which is a pain in the butt. It's not a good workflow. You'd have to use some external Lemmy community website, convert the link into the bang link, then put it into your mobile client. And then subscribe. It's a terrible workflow.
It's extremely high friction, which means smaller instances are only going to know about the large communities that people bother to do it for.
Am I hopeful this workflow gets better? Absolutely! I have faith that this workflow will get better on many clients. But right now it's high friction very high friction
Oh, okay, so you're talking about a case scenario where you're on a small/new instance that also isn't your own. Got it, dunno why I was making a different assumption. Yeah, I can see what you're talking about then.
Even if it is my own instance. It's still high friction. Populating small instances, which is what we want in federation right? We want lots of distributed instances. We need central discovery, or distributed discovery, right now there's basically no discovery at the instance level
Yeah, on a more practical note, the liftoff lemmy app has lemmy.world baked in (and makes it fairly easy to add other instances to) which is a fairly big instance so its all feed could be a good point to start adding stuff in a fairly straightforward way. Not saying that's as good as adding better discovery to mainline lemmy, but maybe a somewhat low barrier option to share with people who might find it useful in the meantime