> Then they can ask.

When a new/casual user is looking at https://[instance]/communities, with the “ALL” button selected, why would it ever occur to them that they would need to ask others if that really is all the communities communities?

There really should be a link to this on every instance/communities page with a note that if users really want to see “all” communities, they must use a 3rd party search tool to do it.

This is a solution for 1 single person. It doesn’t solve the greater problem that the experience is VERY inconsistent for new users depending on whether they got lucky and first joined a large instance or if they got unlucky and joined a small instance. It also doesn’t retroactively repair the horrible first experience that new users have with lemmy.

What you offered really isn’t an solution as much as it is mansplaining…and that’s not really helpful at all when what we’re talking about here are the perceptions of new users.

You are obviously speaking from the privilege of someone not only familiar with how lemmy works, and who understands the difference and pros/cons of joining a large vs small instance and can probably even name a bunch, but also someone who knows of obscure tools and github repos that host those tools. What prevents users from switching using that obscure tool you referenced is that most users never heard of it and didn’t know it even existed. You are using the argument that new and casual users should have god-level knowledge and understanding…which is exactly the point I’m trying to argue against. Casual and new users don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what other communities are out there and they don’t know that when they view “all” that they aren’t seeing them. Think about this from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what you know.

Regarding your argument about NSFW and foreign language search results…that already happens now when users of your instance have subscribed to those things. You can’t argue that it would become a problem when it’s already happening right now. If it really was the problem that you think it is, then the solution would be to mimic what every other search tool figured out three decades ago and put an option to exclude nsfw results when viewing/searching “all” communities. It’s already possible for communities to flag themselves as NSFW, and it’s already possible for communities to designate their community language setting, it would make sense that those options be presented to users for filtering. These filtering options are things we need now regardless of whether search results come from actual-all or subset-all. I’m just suggesting that “all” mean “actual all”.

But, just for fun, let’s steelman your claim that it would be technologically infeasible for “all” to be “all fediverse” as opposed to a subset of just what this server’s users subscribe to (it’s absolutely not technologically infeasible, but lets pretend it is) - even it that scenario, they should at least change up the UI for the communities page to make it clear that when the user selects “all” that they aren’t really getting all - it should be made clear what the user is actually getting, which is “local, plus foreign content that is subscribed to locally”. It simply is not truly “all”, so presenting it as “all” is only leading to more confusion about what the users are seeing.

The word “all” fundamentally means everything? By calling it “all” they are really doing a disservice to everyone who, gasp, assumes “all” means “all” when it really means “local communities and local user foreign subscriptions”. I don’t know what they should call it, but redefining the words “all” to be “not all” is super confusing, especially for users new to lemmy.

It’s a massive usability issue and a massive content discovery issue, imo.

For lemmy users who got lucky and had their first lemmy experience on a top 5 instance where a lot of popular off-instance communities are already subscribed to, then users would see a huge list of both local and foreign communities. For users who got unlucky and had their first lemmy experience on a small instance, their view of “all” looks like a ghost town.

Part of the problem is semantical. If they are going to call it “all” then it should really be all (all lemmy communities available on all federated instances). If it isn’t going to actually show everything, then they should call it something else that indicates it’s only local communities plus whatever local users are subscribed to.

Distance from screen: 1/2 to 3/4 back (2/3 back being ideal)

Horizontal position: as centered as possible

Since I don’t associate LGBTQ+ with child-grooming, that notion never occurred to me. But now that you mention it, and knowing the current sad state of the current political climate, that point sounds entirely plausible. Thank you for pointing that out.

gosh it isn’t “narcissist” to not “check the latest couple dozen posts

“I just discovered this thing, and since it’s new to me I immediately conclude that no one else has seen it either because the horizon of my reality extends no farther than the diameter of my own head”…is absolutely narcissist.

The opposite of narcissism is considering that other people exist, and that other people might have found it and posted it first, and to assume they have until you do some minimum amount of diligence to find out. That minimum amount of diligence is just checking for recent posts on the same topic - it’s not rocket science - it’s just having the basic minimum amount of social-awareness to consider there are other people in that community who may have already posted it.

Thanks for clarifying your earlier comment.

Hard to know the true motives of the blahaj admin - could be they felt this was the only way to protect their community from a perceived evil, could be they were just offended that the LemmyNSFW admin had the audacity to stand their ground on principle, could be they personally objected to nsfw content and this was as plausible a reason as any to act on the desire to defederate. I see they are still federated with a few other much smaller porn/nsfw instances.

There’s a lot of content I’m just not into - and I happily block those communities. But I would never want to inflict my own likes & dislikes on others. So I think a move like this is unenlightened.

But, I also think there needs to be an instance that fits everyone, and if lemmy.blahaz.zone wants to be the morality-police instance for their users, and their users like that, then more power to them.

they do not discriminate against people who are “too young”.

This is a misrepresentation of what was said. Was that intentional? It sounds like you are trying to inject your own opinion into what you are presenting as factual and unbiased.

The actual quote I think you are referring to is:

That means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young, cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes not discriminating against legal adults that look younger than people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after.

I’ve highlighted some key words I think you missed.

I think what you have observed is short-lived. I am starting to notice a lot of poor reddit etiquette showing up more and more here.

One of my huge pet peeves is multiple people posting the exact same link to the exact same article into the exact same community over the span of several hours. I’m not sure if they are doing it for the attention, if they are narcissists and assume that because they just discovered it that no one else might have posted it first, or if they are just too damned self-centered to quickly check the latest couple dozen posts to make sure they aren’t posting a dupe.

I desperately need them to swap positions of the two bananas on the left.

I’m currently using Liftoff as my daily goto client, but I also like Connect very much except for the way it handles images and nsfw images. I’m also curtently evaluating Thunder, but I’m not sure if I want to try memorizing yet another gesture-based interface.

I Saw Her Standing There

It’s certainly not one of their many compositional masterpieces, but I really love this song because of how quintessential it is of that very early British pop invasion style with the catchy twangy guitar melody.

“If it is stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.” - Mercedes Lackey

These companies do it to sell product, not because they actually do or don’t believe in some political agenda. If it works to sell more product, then they are going to do it regardless of how repulsive some niche group in a far corner of the internet finds it.

I still haven’t fully abandoned reddit. Reason: There are a number of niche communities I’m part of that just have zero or near-zero population here. Fediverse just doesn’t yet have the minimum critical mass of users necessary to be a viable alternative for anything but the most common and basic topics.

As far as making the switch for the common/popular stuff, there were difficulties that I ran into but I’ve mostly adapted. My first big mistake was trying to use Jerboa (I thought it was the ‘official’ app, but quickly discovered that it loves to shit itself if the app version is out of sync with the server version by even a sub-sub-dot version number. It also crashed a lot. Another early mistake was joining a small instance and not realizing that their view of “all” communities was not the same as the view of “all” communities from a bigger instance…and so my earliest view of the fediverse was pretty crippled until I started creating accounts on other instances. My next problem was the learning curve: I didn’t see a lot of the communities I wanted while on that small instances and so I started creating them, only to later discover that many of those communities already existed on other instances and were well established. Fediverse has a MASSIVE community discoverability problem that needs to be solved before more of the masses will be attracted to it.

Now that I’ve got a good working client that I like, have local accounts on the main instances where most of the communities I participate in are located, have re-found replacement communities for the ones I lost access to when beehaw de-federated, I estimate that after about 2 more years at current growth, fediverse might also be a viable alternate to those niche communities I’m still going to reddit for. I’d estimate that I’m 70% fediverse + 30% reddit at this point.

Do you normally browse all? I just browse subscribed - and this isn’t a problem for me. “All” is a measure of what’s popular, and porn is popular.

That’s very insightful. I still don’t think that qualifies as being ‘public’, but given a malicious instance operator they could be exposed if that post is accurate.