this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
12 points (92.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43898 readers
1033 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I've noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like it's not taking advantage of the full power that Lemmy could have.

Imagine for a moment that instances were more focus-based. Instead of having communities that are all mostly unrelated we had entire instances that are focused on one specific area of expertise or interest. Imagine a LOTR instance that had many sub-communities (in this case "communities" would be the wrong way to look at it, it would be more like categories) that dealt with different subjects in the LOTR universe: books, movies, lore, gaming, art, etc all in the same instance.

Imagine the types of instances that could be created with more granular categories within to better guide conversations: Baseball, Cars, Comics, Movies, Tech etc.

A tech instance could have dedicated communities for news, programming, dev, IT, Microsoft, Apple, iOS, linux. Or you could make it even more granular by having a dedicated instance for each of those because there's so many categories that could be applied to each.

What are your thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] notun@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Exactly, it's really inconvenient right now. And it's really important for the usability of what OP suggested.

If I simply link to a cool community I found, like https://beehaw.org/c/programming, you can't follow that link conveniently if you're from another instance.

And I highly disagree with only being important at the start. It's a big hurdle that stifles growth right now and in the future.

[โ€“] this@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Agreed, what needs to happen is an option that allows users to follow links from foreign instances in their home instance seamlessly. I have to imagine with the ramped up amount of development in lemmy that some of the devs must be working on it.

[โ€“] dimath@lemmy.pt 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No, that's not right You can follow any community from any instance with your account, doesn't matter where you registered your account. I just subscribed to https://beehaw.org/c/programming from lemmy.pt user account

[โ€“] pistachio@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

this is buggy. Pardon the nsfw, but it doesn't work for gonewild@lemmynsfw .com

[โ€“] Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's more of the interface you're using a fault for not interpreting links correctly - it should be obvious that url/c/communityname should be interpreted as a community, just as !communityname@instance.org (right now jerboa is interpreting it as an email address) should also be interpreted as one, and if you remove the ! It should be interpreted as a username.

But most interfaces are open source, so give them time and someone (maybe even you) can submit a pull request that fixes it. That's the beauty of open source - in time the bugs get ironed out because it's a collaborative effort.

[โ€“] _finger_@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You can definitely sub to external communities from a separate instance, I have a bunch from Lemmy.ml show up in my world feed

[โ€“] tet42@ka.tet42.org 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes you can subscribe to and read/reply to that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn't already federate with it.

Go to 'Communities' at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)

This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.

On the next page, change the top search dropdown from Communities to All.

You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.

Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribers

Click it, then on the top right pane click "Subscribe"

Done

[โ€“] notun@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Jesus Christ. I'm well aware of how you can subscribe to other instances. This is about convenience, with problems arising from situations like I described above.

[โ€“] tet42@ka.tet42.org 1 points 1 year ago

Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I'm sorry that I assumed you didn't know how to do that. I meant no offense but there's no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.

There's no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don't know what the plans are.

At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don't here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.