this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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[–] captainjaneway@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure I agree. I don't like those two solutions. They basically try to centralize the platform. I think Lemmy is a little confusing at first, but that's a UX/UI problem and not necessarily a good enough reason to change underlying features of the platform.

I think a user subscribing to communities across instances is a pretty tough technical challenge and it would be very difficult to manage. How are particular communities decided to be a part of a multi-community? Is it voted on? Is there a mod of the multi-community? If so, that could still lead to bifurcation wherein you now have a multi-community that claims to provide all /c/pokemon content across instances but is potentially missing many viable communities on some instances due to things like moderator in-fighting or moderator preferences.

I like how Lemmy allows for sort of duplicate communities. Reddit already had that issue and people naturally flocked to the communities that had the content that suited them. I think it would behoove Lemmy to stay away from trying to centralize it all.

However, I agree that it is confusing. I think this is a UI/UX challenge which needs to be solved. I don't have the solution, but I think it's clear that the app language needs to help users naturally feel comfortable living within an instance and moving across instances.

I am open to suggestions and I am fully happy to be proven wrong. But as a software engineer, the second GitHub issue gave me the heeby-jeebies on a technical front. Seemed a little hairy for a young platform to take on right now. I think there are plenty of other lower hanging fruit id prefer for the community to solve:

  • Building a nice mobile android app Jerboa is pretty good but it needs some TLC. Timeouts happen frequently on my app and crash it/erase content I was reading
  • Provide better documentation/marketing materials for new users. I'm open to the idea of a centralized website where users can go to create accounts, learn about Lemmy, and maybe initially subscribe to popular communities

All in all though, I feel like Lemmy is totally usable. Actually, the most confusing thing to me was learning that I could see my comments and posts on Mastodon. That threw me through a loop. I still don't understand Mastodon since the UI - to me - just seems to be random comments. I don't really have any thread-based context to understand the comments I see on my Mastodon app. So for now I stick to Jerboa.

[–] communist@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They basically try to centralize the platform.

No, they don't, I don't know why you think that, this is really what federation is all about, seamless communication between servers, all they do is make it so that linking to different posts across the fediverse doesn't log you out, or remove you from your instance unnecessarily

The other one ALLOWS you to categorize subreddits. Neither of these are bad things in any way, and if you don't like them, you can manually visit other instances, and simply not use the multireddits.

I like how Lemmy allows for sort of duplicate communities. Reddit already had that issue and people naturally flocked to the communities that had the content that suited them. I think it would behoove Lemmy to stay away from trying to centralize it all.

This won't change anything about that, it'll just sort them by category

Building a nice mobile android app Jerboa is pretty good but it needs some TLC. Timeouts happen frequently on my app and crash it/erase content I was reading

this isn't worth focusing on right now because: https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy

Provide better documentation/marketing materials for new users. I’m open to the idea of a centralized website where users can go to create accounts, learn about Lemmy, and maybe initially subscribe to popular communities

join-lemmy definitely needs an upgrade.