this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
96 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37712 readers
268 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I'd prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could hopefully at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There's a reason why every community shouldn't be on a single instance. It's a single point of failure.
Very frustrating for sure, I feel like I'm constantly playing ping pong with new users.
New user doesn't understand lemmy and searches for community on service like
lemmy.ml. Community doesn't exist so the spam the "Create Community" button or spam the admin for it. Admin is overworked/doesn't know/busy building the site and says "okay", meanwhile there is already a community of 100+ members on another instance.For me, I built my instance to take some weight off of the main instances, thought "hey here's a group of communities that are pretty close knit that don't need to put pressure on the already overloaded servers", and I still get people who are posting "I made ____ community on lemmy.ml come join!" and it's like dude, ffs.
For example, I run an instance that focuses on a genre of music. Thus, I'm pretty dang open to anything even remotely open to that.
That turned a bit more ranty than I expected.
Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.
Peoples are lazy. They don't want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn't know it exists, its wonky at best.
If a user cant type "Stephen King community" in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn't exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that "Create Community" button.
For sure, as much as I want users to be smarter... well my experience in development tells me they never will be. I literally had one user ping me on Lemmy asking how to join, I gave them pictures detailing steps. They were on mobile and gave up because "The subscribe button was in the sidebar and it was too confusing"
That's what we're up against. The extra button click was too much for some users.
Lemmy has to get more user friendly when it comes to subscribing. You're absolutely right it needs to be one search and click "subscribe". They should bring the feddit browser into lemmy really.
I feel you. When creating an UI you can think of thousands of possibilities which might not be clear to someone however obvious they seem and then design it in a way that couldn't possibly be misunderstood, then show it to different people who all agree that it's clearly structured and logical..... and the minute you release it you get posts from users where you ask yourself how they could even exist on their own.
yup, which is exactly how the lemmy devs must feel about us, "wtf it's so simple", but everyone's brain works differently. As a dev myself, you really do kind of start to resent your users after a while