An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.

I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.

Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?

Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.

I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.

We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.

Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.

Some people, communities or instances will. Others will not. That’s kind of the nature of the fediverse, it’s not homogenous but diverse.

I agreed with you yesterday

I think we only had contact an hour ago or so, or I’m unaware. What I mean to say is, I’m afraid you might confuse me with someone else.

That wasn’t the argument.

Then why do you make that point so often? People tell you they don’t want to talk about politics, and you respond with ‘everything is politics’. While technically true, it’s a way to completely misunderstand what they said, get yourself into trouble and be annoying to everyone else in the process. People even don’t have to agree with your definition of politics. When they express their desire to not talk about something, it’s good advice to try to understand what they actually meant, not start a discussion about what the word means from your perspective.

How many people share your point of view ‘about what politics is’, and how many strongly disagree? What authority do you have on the subject? If there are many people using language differently, isn’t that alone enough reason to reconsider your uncompromising position?

Everything is political.

And yet it is possible and fine to define which topics belong to a community, and which topics do not.

Note this doesn’t change anything about this group being political by your definition.

So if a group decides they only want to discuss cute cat pics, and specifically do not want to discuss social topics regarding humans (what people roughly mean when they express their antipathy for politics), that’s one of many ways to make a cat community. It’s still a political group in your book, necessarily. It’s still not okay to talk about labor unions in that cat community.

…what if I just don’t like seeing news that only makes me feel angry or bad on my feed.

That’s not the meaning of the word politics. […] This other thing you’re talking about, bad news, that’s not what politics is. Sure, bad news is political, but that’s because everything is political.

I feel you missed a chance to get a less aggressive perspective on all of this.

The other person told you they “just come here to see tech, cars, and art.”. Probably hinting at a casual experience, with little to no opinionated or controversial topics. Maybe they have a mental health too, maybe they have a super political day job, or whatever. There are many reasons for people to seek another experience on Lemmy than you do. This does not necessarily imply they are your political enemies and need a lesson from you.

The belief that bad news and politics are the same thing has been used to justify transphobia, sexism, and racism.

While in a specific way it is true that everything is politics, this does not mean it is okay to make everything about politics. You cannot connect a persons desire to have Lemmy without politics to justifications about transphobia, sexism, and racism. That’s crossing several lines.

Have you looked into non-violent communication?

If you don’t like this blahaj server’s rules or anything, just leave. Its just the internet.

Yes, but, but …

‘What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they’ll keep being wrong!’

Oooh, I didn’t know! Just tested, confirmed :(

So OP probably did everything right, but the world wasn’t ready yet.

Good point, thanks for spelling it out. I was only vaguely aware of what you just described.

That seems to be something unique, tied to the federated structure. Could be confusing for people coming from monolithic platforms. They may not realize what they are seeing.

The default web UI supports cross-posting:

Links to cross-posts will appear directly below (before the text body of the post).

I don’t think there’s really a good reason to keep communities split.

The federated nature of the fediverse with all it’s implications.

An instance hosting a community might

• become unstable
• disappear forever
• defederate or become defederated from/by my instance
• same for the instances of other users of that community

Communities can have the same topic, but differ in

• moderation style
• policies regarding if and how bots are allowed

I think it’s good to have some redundancy both as a backup and to have some choice. As with all things fediverse, we don’t need to find a consensus. Those who like to have one big instance or community can join the biggest. Those who prefer some diversity can spread out and create duplicates. Reality will most likely always be something in between.

Another approach could be to ask: Why are communities split? If you’re right and there’s really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often? Maybe the prevalence of the phenomenon hints at reasons which exist, but are not well understood.

It can also make comment sections confusing where people talk about the comment section. When different viewers see different versions of the comment section (for example through different combinations of federation), it can be extra confusing to merge them all into one stream.

I wish it was. This is a disconnected duplicate, not a proper cross-post. Actual cross-posts are linked to each other in the title section, making it easier for participants to visit the other discussion(s).

I like this idea, but I also studied computer science. From a user’s perspective, I think we can and should dumb it down further:

Automatically choose one instance for new users. With a sophisticated algorithm or simply pick one at random, I don’t care.

And most users probably won’t care either. If they do, they can migrate to another instance. At that point, they know better what this is all about and can make an informed decision.

We trade the worries and time spent by new users trying to understand the system and their needs, against the worries and time spent by more experienced users which instance they might like better.

Seriously, would it be possible to integrate Lemmy Handshake into Lemmy source code?

I feel this should be part of the core package.

I take this as a big point for “see how well you can do without caring about it”. And think talking about it should be kept to a minimum during onboarding. Although it’s understandable why pages like https://join-lemmy.org/ talk so much about it, even about hosting your own server!

This is from nerds to nerds, in a wholesome way. But most people aren’t nerds, and as you prove, don’t need to get into the details to use it, enjoy it, participate and contribute.

My vision is: Hide all the tech talk in ‘advanced signup’ and make the default signup process as quick and easy as possible.

A good part of that can be explained by the low time resolution of the graph. 1 month.

Let’s assume 1 month ago, 100 new people signed up. Let’s say 20 of those made a comment or post, which is the requirement to be counted as an active user.

Many of those 100 didn’t stay for various reasons. Of the 20 ‘active’ users, only 15 were coming back the next day.

But the graph still counts 20 active users for a whole month. Only 1 month after a user last commented or posted, this user is no longer counted as ‘active’. So now we see a drop of -5 (all numbers made up).

I think it’s perfectly normal that not everyone who signs up makes a post or comment. And that not everyone who tries out something new will stick around the next day, or the next week.

With a large number of new signups, which we had in the last months, it can be expected that another a large number is only active for a short time. Due to the low resolution, we probably see what happened 1 month ago.

Which is the end of another xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/552/