TLDR: Poor discoverability impedes the threadiverse’s growth by making life hard for new users. Here are some suggestions on how discoverability could be improved.
- Make fediverse-wide search more friendly by hiding complex front-ends and grouping search results by type
- Allow communities to be discovered more easily on unfederated instances via directory services
- Bring over at least some content (last X posts, last Y days, all pinned posts) when first federating communities
- Ideally bring over all content, or find a way for searches and sorts to interrogate the most complete set of community data (likely the data on the community’s original instance)
I’m still learning about how the fediverse works, so if I’ve gotten something wrong in the following discussion (eg terminology, or even a fundamental understanding of federation works), please do correct me. There’s a chance I’m making a total fool of myself with this post, but here goes anyway.
In my opinion fundamental to the popularity of reddit is the ability for anyone to create niche communities. That’s what set reddit apart from predecessors like slashdot or digg, where there were only a small number of pre-determined categories, like tech, politics or gaming.
Critically, reddit it makes it very easy for new users to:
- Discover communities tailored to their - even very narrow - set of interests.
- Immediately see what people are talking about in their chosen community, ie to show it is active.
- See what people had been talking about, ie to surface high quality content
The fediverse is poor at all three of these discoverability features.
I have four suggestions on how these issues might be fixed which are summarised above. I’ll post these in separate comments as the post would otherwise be too long.
(By the way, I’m generally going to use the term “community” to describe both lemmy communities and kbin magazines, simply because I think “community” is more descriptive. Similarly, “posts” will generally refer to a mix of threads, articles, comments, replies etc.)
Assuming my understanding of how the fediverse works (as I said, I’m still learning, having only heard the word fediverse for the first time a few weeks ago) isn’t too far out of whack with reality, I’m guessing these solutions may all be various degrees of difficult to implement. And not necessarily implementable at the individual instance (kbin.social, startrek.website) level, or threadiverse software level (kbin, lemmy), but perhaps requiring thought and application at the ActivityPub protocol level.
But I believe that making threadiverse communities and content more easily discoverable by new users will be critical in growing the fediverse overall.
2. ALLOW COMMUNITIES TO BE DISCOVERED MORE EASILY ON UNFEDERATED INSTANCES
Communities should automatically (unless the community owner deliberately prevents this) be registered with one or more community directory services. The lemmy/kbin community search facility should use these services by default so that a new user’s search results are not limited to communities that have already been pulled into that user’s instance.
Multiple directory services should be available for the search service (similar to how you can switch between DNS servers) in order to eliminate single point sensitivity, which is part of the fediverse ethos.
The current method of finding new communities not already federated (“enter the exact, direct address of the community, and/or search and wait for a day before any results show up for anything not already on this instance”) should be deprecated and only be used in the event these community directory services are down.
This will prevent the following scenario: A new user chooses an instance, creates an account, and searches for a community related to their interest on that instance. They may find a popular community (eg /gaming), because other users on that instances have already joined it (or because someone has created this community on their instance). But even moderately obscure communities will likely not appear in the search results because they’re hosted on another instance, and nobody on this instance has subscribed to them yet. This makes it look like the fediverse is a lot emptier than it actually is, because niche communities (the long tail of communities that are the secret sauce of reddit’s success) are difficult to discover.
Basically, every community should easily be discoverable from any instance on first search (unless the community owner deliberately chooses to hide their community from the directory services).
I know there are already some websites that act as a directory of communities, but you have to be aware of these in order to use them. They are not built into the native community search functionality of lemmy or kbin, so 99% of users (especially new users) will not be aware of them.