Ask Lemmy
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I think there’s a problem it introduces for users, particularly casual users (which I think we could use a lot more of).
The first problem is discovery. Discovery isn’t something that can be solved server side afaik without adding a unifying layer to act as an indexer, which is kind of feasible but not really in the federated spirit and would need client integration in any case. Discovery could be made better on the client side, but every client I’ve tried so far has no idea how to do results ranking. I’ll search for “politics” and the top result will be from a topic on an instance with zero posts and two subscribers. Some allow users to specify a sort order but miss results present on other clients, and the sort orders are pretty primitive and only allow you to choose one. I’m also honestly unsure how mainstream search engine indexing is supposed to work (eg “Toyota repair reddit”).
The second is content repetition. People (and bots) will frequently post the exact same content to multiple communities and multiple instances. This problem is exacerbated by the lower content rate, which leaves people browsing /all in case someone posted something interesting somewhere. Again, maybe this is something you could do client side with some off the shelf recommendation engine, and I think a great feature would be to have the ability for users to consolidate feeds into a single feed, and even posts (on identical articles, for example) into a single displayed post, such that the conversation could cross multiple instances transparently.
Kbin shows where links have been posted on other federated servers. It's 10/10 for finding what community is actively discussing a post. I even found a few new subs I gave up on being active here.
@Sabata11792 it's great, we can see at a glance exactly where the active discussions are, when the crossposts are etc.
That update seriously reinvigorated my enthusiasm for KBin as a platform. It's really nice to see a story I find interesting, regardless of magazine/community, then see where folks are actually discussing it.
@wjrii me too - and if there's more than one discussion, sometimes they have gone in different directions.
I also like the way it gives me a chance to upvote the original poster, and see communities I didn't know were out there.
And, it helps avoid reposts within the same community, not to mention the phenomenon I saw recently where a post got posted in community A, cross-posted in community B, and then reposted as a cross-post from community B into community A again. :D
I feel like this isn’t discussed in enough of these meta discussions.
I want, for instance, for a video game discussion to have some input from the dude who has just buys Madden and Call of Duty every year.
Absolutely. I think the entire community benefits when we have 60 year old ladies with gardening tips, foodies discussing fine dining and recipes, pet owners with advice driven by twenty years of owning chihuahuas, and sports people talking about sports (okay, that one’s not so much in my ballpark, as it were, but it’s all part of having communities).
If it’s a community for Linux users, or ML folks (machine learning, not politics), or the otherwise terminally online and tech obsessed, I’m fine with the bar for participation being high. At that point we have a filter rather than a net. But if we want to displace (or at least be a serious alternative) to services like Reddit, we need to make the on-ramp and UX easy for people whose interests are interesting but don’t necessarily include technology beyond knowing how to click on the blue words. If someone can tell me that putting an aspirin in my rhododendron will make it spring forth like Athena from the head of Zeus, I don’t care if they know the fediverse from a hole in the ground.
Also, I made that tip up. Don’t do it, or if you do let me know if it actually works.
We have this at Kbin - collections (like multireddits, but shareable/followable as well); they really help with discovery.
It's a great feature, I hope you get something like it for Lemmy.
Https://kbin.social/magazines/collections
I think if we could get something like this and build an Apollo type UI around it, we’d accelerate adoption and some app builder would make a fair chunk of money. I’m not allowed to build apps, but I do hope someone takes this up.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Thank you for this. I know these kinds of resources exist, and I even occasionally remember to make use of them :)
What I’m suggesting is that lemmy (and the community as a whole) would benefit from baking this functionality into the clients (including the web front ends if that’s a big chunk of the user base).
Discoverability is always a problem. Even centralized services such as Reddit have issues - I was still discovering new communities pretty much until the day I left after being on there since Alien Blue came out. It’s worse in decentralized communities because of the nature of the beast. Back in the Usenet days, it was considered a point of pride to know enough to find niche newsgroups, and even ones like alt.hack felt exclusive. Most of it passed around by word of mouth.
Even though the Usenet-like aspects of lemmy give it advantages over centralized sites like Reddit, I think we’ve learned enough over the last 30 years or so that we know user experience is absolutely critical if you want a popular service. I’m going to hazard a guess that when the big, well funded apps start to federate, they’re going to have those kinds of features built in. I’d rather see some of the smaller developers roll out features like that first, so that they can continue to be competitive (as AB and later on Apollo were for Reddit).