Fester
Poor bot will be constantly woken up only to remember that there is no one to remind. Only the void.
The apps are going to be a game changer. If they can make it easier and intuitive to sign up, manage your accounts, find communities, and eventually group communities together and filter your feed, casual users will start flocking. It’s all about the UX and UI.
I hope to see the apps even accept donations and distribute part of it to the Lemmy devs and server hosts to help keep things sustainable.
Back in 2021 Reddit released an update for the official app that caused scrolling to stutter, instantly heating up my battery and deplete battery life at an absurd rate. This was on Apple’s newest top phone at the time (12 Pro Max.)
I immediately knew something was fucky, so I switched to Apollo that same night. I checked back for about 3 more updates over a few weeks. During that time, Reddit never acknowledged the bug or fixed it. Since then, it looks like they’ve repeatedly caused the same issue with iOS and some android phones.
If they didn’t shit the bed back then, I’d never have discovered Apollo or realized it was better in every way - not just at not physically destroying my new phone.
And now here we are again, discovering new and better alternatives in Lemmy and decentralization thanks to Reddit’s incompetent fuckery. Thanks Reddit!
https://lemmyverse.net/ is great - it even has a copy URL button.
“Ya’ll can’t behave.”
I mean, I have nothing against moderating whatsoever and I appreciate good mods. But that specific phrase always made me cringe. I just hope I don’t find every potentially controversial post already locked when I open it with YaLL CAn’T bEhAVe or similar condescending laziness at the top.
They’re separate and you should probably just join them all. There’s a ton of “gaming” communities, for example. There’s no reason for them to feel they’re competing, since people can just join them all and they can have their own separate rules. I think over time some will naturally become more popular and others will die off. Depends on the mods and how they manage it, really, plus other organic factors. But they are literally just different, unique communities. Consider the @instance to be an important part of the community name.
I imagine apps will eventually allow you to group communities under custom “topics” or something, so it seems cohesive from the users’ perspective. If you’re familiar with Apollo, you could create “Multi-Reddits” for a custom feed with any subs you put in each Multi-Reddit. It was super useful. I had one for gaming, one for news, one for cats. In this case where so many have the same name, it would be helpful to have a reminder label when you comment or post so you see exactly where you’re posting, and maybe a helpful link to the sidebar so you can double check the rules for that particular community. Maybe the Lemmy devs will even add an option for the communities to group together on their end somehow, someday, while still maintaining their decentralized independence.
The sky’s the limit for what may happen in the coming months/years, and improvements are happening fast. For now, enjoy the fact that there are many community options. I don’t see it as a problem, but a feature of decentralization.
You can always group them yourself, if you want, by creating a different account for each topic you’re interested in and only subscribing to a narrow number communities on that account. That way your home tab on one account would show all the gaming or cat pic communities you chose. Then switch back to your ”main” account for all the beans memes, etc.
Also, if you’re searching from your instance or in an app, you may not be seeing all the communities that exist if your instance hasn’t already connected to them. You also don’t see how many total users across all instances are subscribed - just the number of your local instance users that subscribed. So check out https://lemmyverse.net/communities for a better and more complete way to find and view communities and their stats - especially if you’re looking for the largest ones. Copy the full URL (starting with the !) and then paste it in your app’s search bar for a foolproof way to get to it.
Reading material: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
