One of the biggest issues I’m having trouble getting past with Lemmy is not knowing which communities to subscribe to.
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
Is there a way to “clump” these communities together so I can just subscribe to one “multi-community” that houses the posts from all of them?
Subscribing to 10 technology communities will likely get you a much, much more vibrant experience than just subbing to r/technology. People actually, you know, discuss things in smaller spaces, rather than just drop drive-by comments that no one will ever read.
As Lemmy grows, communities on certain servers will die out and some will accumulate all the users. I think the problem will die out eventually.
Though, I think there should be some way to migrate users of a community to a new server. Sounds hard to implement but maybe doable.
I hope some functionality like that will show up purely because I need this question to stop appearing every 3 minutes.
Yes, you’ll subscribe to 10 technology subs. Oh no the humanity.
I, too, am annoyed by this one. It’s like people forgot that reddit had multiple tech subs too, you just picked the biggest one usually. This is no different, just nothing is big yet. Maybe its that last part that bothers people.
I, personally, want things to be decentralized. I want to have 100+ technology communities that are all relevant. But for that to be practical, there needs to be a simple mechanism for people to follow the topic “technology”, and get the content of all these 100+ communities merged together (then perhaps manually block some of them that have bad moderation). Unless we have such mechanism, we’ll end up with one main big technology community, and all others will be secondary.
Mastodon lets you subscribe to hashtags. Misskey/Calckey let’s you create saved searches for termsaand hashtags.
Community tags and either of those options would go a long, long way.
Both also have lists. Being able to add communities to lists would give people the “metacommunities” they think they want.
But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest. People have a lot of FOMO around this, but it’s not like anyone read even 1% of anything that was ever posted to big subreddit. They never feared missing out on all of the stuff below the fold.
I think my biggest frustration is feeling like I am missing communities based on my instance. I have 2 accounts on different instances, 1 I created a few weeks ago and 1 I created a few days ago. On my newer account, I couldn’t find half the communities I was looking for unless I dropped a direct link into the search (looking just for the name didn’t turn anything up). And then when I did finally find them, the subscriber number was different (like 1 community had 100+ subscribers on my first account, but the same community only showed like 2 or 3 subscribers on my second account). Anyway I’m sure user error plays a role in this, but it is not intuitive to me, just yet anyway.
You should be able to see all via this https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
Shit just works should have also a “communities” button at the top with a all button.
I’m hoping for two features: Let communities “follow” other communities - so one community’s content also shows up on the other. And let me group communities together on my personal feed, if they don’t want to follow each other for some reason. For now, I stay mostly on the home page, which aggregates everything - but I’d much prefer to be able to browse by topic and still have some aggregation.
I hope that with future versions of lemmy they can create “lists” that people can subscribe to that will do this.
or at least let you add communities to your own lists that do that.
How is that different from how subscriptions work now, other than adding one more thing to click to get to your “list” to add a subscription?
You could group them and look at everything “outdoors” related from multiple communities in a single feed.
Yeah, that would be cool. Right now we only have 3 options: All, Local, or Subscribed. I’d love a submenu that let me generate an individualized feed based on multiple subscriptions that I grouped together, and also let me name & save these feeds.
Ive commented on this before. I call it towns. A town has multiple communites. Its basically a multireddit but work with me here.
Towns are tied to your account on your instance. Its only use is to group communities to be easier to read.
Clearly there’s one problem with “lemmons,” you’d always have to be on the lookout for The Lemmon-Stealing Horse!