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?
OP’s post is about having specialized instances, making hopping around necessary. It’s not convenient enough as it is.
By hopping around, do you mean changing your account to one on another instance, or viewing a list of communities on an instance, or something else?
I don’t feel that changing accounts is necessary because of the magic of federation. But I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance. That would be a cool feature, but is only really important when you’re initially picking all your subscriptions.
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.
You can definitely sub to external communities from a separate instance, I have a bunch from Lemmy.ml show up in my world feed
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 [email protected] (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.
Yes you can subscribe to and read 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 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 subscribersClick it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”
Done
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.
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
this is buggy. Pardon the nsfw, but it doesn’t work for gonewild@lemmynsfw .com
On lemmy:
This will show you communities matching your search term from all instances*.
You can then subscribe to communities regardless on which instance they live and use them seemlessly, regardless of wether they are local or not.
*) It will show you communities matching your search term from all instances, if your instance has already discovered that community.
If it has not, it shows ‘No Results’. You can force it by some exclamation mark shenanigans which I haven’t understood well enough to explain. After that, your instance knows about that community in the other instance and will show it in future search results. I think as soon as one person from your instance force-discovers a community from another instance, that community becomes searchable for everyone on your instance.
The asterisk is the problem, IMO. There’s even a (I consider it a) bug where you have to deselect “Communities” from your search and choose “All” if you want to directly search for a community by its global name. Probably some interaction with global names and URLs, but it is a bit unintuitive.
Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.
Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to [email protected] FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.
Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.
I know. We all know.
Convenience is the issue here. You can’t directly go to an instance and start subscribing, you need to take unnecessary detours.
…which would be perfectly fine if we had a better search functionality.
If I search for something I’m interested in in some consolidated place (preferably directly from my lemmy instance or app), and it always finds what I want, and I can always subscribe to it, and links always work for it… then I won’t care about going directly to an instance to subscribe.