Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Following remote communities is hard. (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It's easy to discover communities on my instance via the dedicated page in the hamburger menu. But let's say I want to follow a community on another instance, such as [email protected] . I might have found its name mentioned in a post or comment. When I click on the provided link, I'm thrown on that instances web page, from which I of course can't subscribe.

So what I instead have to do is to copy the description of the link and paste it in my instance's search bar. Which isn't easy, since it's a link, so there isn't even a straightforward way to select the link text without clicking the link. This seems very unintuitive and makes the process of joining a whole bunch of communities tedious. Is there a better way?

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Would second this. I'm a tech savvy person as I work in IT and even I'm having to think about what I'm doing just to subscribe to different communities, then there's multiple of the same communities on different instances etc it is quite tedious as you say.

Really struggling to see how this gets mainstream adoption as your average user isn't going to have much joy.. From my brief interaction with the fediverse I think it's going to become the Linux of social media I.e. for Geeks and Hobbyists rather than your every day user.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Honestly, I think that might be the point. Also, if this place got absolutely overrun with millions of new people, the place would suck. There is something great about smaller, tighter communities.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Think about everything you hate about Reddit—the kids, the trolls, the spam—and be thankful Lemmy requires a little more effort.

This is the way Reddit used to be when it first came out.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my experience there are many good and positive casual users on reddit as well as toxic and obnoxious techies. Knowing how to navigate an obtuse UI is not a mark of good character.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

No, of course not, but the added…intentionality that it requires weeds a lot out. Remember, trolls usually go after that which requires the least amount of effort. So it’s not about being able to navigate a UI, it’s about effort.

Or maybe that’s just a bunch of bullshit. 4chan is pretty arcane from a UX perspective, and look at the cesspit that place is. I don’t know. It was just a thought experiment.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You also have to create a new account for each instance. At very least I feel as though some centralized account orchestration needs to happen.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

This is not true. You can subscribe to a community on beehaw.org even if your account is on lemmy.ml. That's what this post is about, that the process for doing that is unintuitive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

..that would defeat almost the entire point of being federated and decentralized.