Generally, the lens I’ve come to criticise any/all fediverse projects is how well they foster community building. One reason why I like and “advocate” for the lemmy/threadiverse side of things is precisely because of this and how the centrality of the community/sub/group is a good way of organising social media (IMO).

Also, because of that, I recently came to be skeptical of the effects that the “All” feed can have. I didn’t even realise that people relied mostly on the All feed until recently.

I think I’ve reached the point now of being against it (at least tentatively). I know, it’s a staple and there’s no way it’s going away. And I know it’s useful.

But thinking about the feature set, through the community building lens, I think it’d be fair to say that things are out of balance: they don’t promote community building enough while also providing the All feed which dissolves community building.

Not really a criticism of the developers … AFAIU, the All feed is easier to implement than any other community building feature … and it’s expected from reddit (though it isn’t normal on forums AFAICT, which is maybe worth considering for anyone happy to reassess what about reddit is retained and what isn’t).

But still, I can imagine a platform that is more focused on communities:

  • Community explorer tool built in.
    • Could even be a substitute for an All feed … where you can browse through various communities you don’t know about and see what they’ve posted recently
  • Multi-communities (long time coming by now for many I’d say)
    • Could even be part of the community explorer tool where you can create on-the-fly multi-communities to see their posts in a temporary feed
  • Private and local only communities (already here on lemmy and coming for private communities)
  • Post visibility options for Public communities (IE, posts that opt-in private)
  • More flexible notifications for various things/events that happen within a community
  • Wikis
  • Chat interface
    • I’m thinking this is pretty viable given that Lemmy used to use a web-socket auto-updating design … add that to the flat chat view and you’ve got a chat room. There are resource issues, so limiting them to one per community or 6hrs per week per community or something would probably be necessary.

A possibly interesting and frustrating aspect of all of these suggestions/ideas above is I can see their federation being problematic or difficult … which raises the issue of whether there’s serious tension between platform design and protocol capabilities.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    21·
    3 months ago

    I get that and it’s the common cause for usage of All I think.

    That being said, to push back a little:

    • All browsing was a thing on Reddit too. So I think it’d be fair to say it’s a style of usage some people just prefer or reach for (whether that applies to you)
    • Unless one uses “New” or “scaled” sorting, surely it’s the big communities that dominate the All feed such that subscribing could easily achieve the same?
    • Wouldn’t there be a trade off with interest or relevance being less in the All feed?

    This is my experience at least. There’s definitely interesting stuff that pops up, but there’s some I’m not that interested in. If I’m interested, subscribing often makes sense.

    For me, and I suspect many, multi-communities would go a long way to helping, as sometimes you don’t really want to subscribe to a community but maybe check in from time to time.

    • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      multi-communities would go a long way to helping, as sometimes you don’t really want to subscribe to a community but maybe check in from time to time.

      That’s a major point.

      I typically want to browse different type of content depending on my mood

      • Tech, programming, Android, open source
      • Casual conversations
      • Learning about things
      • Content in a specific language
      • Memes and low effort posts

      Without multicommunities, I’m current juggling between several alts to achieve this. It’s okayish for me, but I know that can be cumbersome for a lot of people.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Yea. It feels like a feature that was due yesterday, especially given that is likely not that hard to implement (and instead got stuck in option paralysis a while ago).

          • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            It’s still going, and yea I’ve thought of that for sure. First cohort (including myself) are finishing The Book.

            Thing is, because there’s be a major front end element, it may not be the best for first contributors.

            I’d personally be quite happy to hack away at it though.

    • MindTravellerEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      All browsing was a thing on Reddit too. So I think it’d be fair to say it’s a style of usage some people just prefer or reach for (whether that applies to you)

      Sure, for other people, but not me. I never casually browsed r/all. I visited it a couple times, and it was always nonsense I didn’t care about. The average Lemmy user is more similar to me than the average Reddit user, so all is usable. Although the average Lemmy user is still a fair bit less similar to me than the average Reddit user of the communities I was subscribed to, so if subscriptions were viable I’d use them on Lemmy too.

      Unless one uses “New” or “scaled” sorting, surely it’s the big communities that dominate the All feed such that subscribing could easily achieve the same?

      i guess so, but I often scroll long enough to run into the bot-posted reddit reposts with no upvotes, so I’m definitely interested in seeing all the content on Lemmy. Of a more relevant nature is that I don’t see posts to remote communities unless a fellow lemmy.ca user is subscribed to them. I ought to subscribe to more remote communities.

      Wouldn’t there be a trade off with interest or relevance being less in the All feed?

      Sure is, I have no desire to click on about half the posts I see, although that number trends upwards quick when I start scraping the bottom of the barrel. But again, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, so it’s not like I’m missing any interesting posts.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        All good. I didn’t want to attack or criticise. Sorry if I was being a dick.

        Of a more relevant nature is that I don’t see posts to remote communities unless a fellow lemmy.ca user is subscribed to them. I ought to subscribe to more remote communities.

        That makes sense too … All on lemmy world or even lemmy ml might be a different story.