Like many others, I’ve been using Lemmy since the reddit blackout started. A few things I think would help onboard folks more easily or contribute to long term success of the platform(s) are:
- an actual introduction to federated sites and what it means, including what happens if your home instances get blocked by ones you’ve subbed to (if this exists drop a link!)
- a better scheme for allowlisting instances. I noticed the one I registered in got removed from beehaw, and as someone who considered starting my own it’s not clear if that style of instance management is doomed to fail
- more / better apps! I wonder how similar the api is to reddit and if existing apps could be ported over
Any major pain points or improvements y’all can think of to continue encouraging adoption?
In addition to better apps, we need more apps in general for foster competition. If there was even one more android and iOS app in active development it would be better for the community.
On the backend, they need to fix discoverability. Specificlt search and link handling.
Sites like browse.feddit.de and Lemmyverse.net are fantastic resources that should be integrated into each instances search capabilities. It should show all communities across all crawled instances whether they are blocked or not. Just display a flag that says blocked by your instance. The more transparent universal search is integrated the better.
On the link handling front, when you use the ! Command to trigger community link auto insertion it makes something like:
!community@instance.tld and hyperlinks it to https://homeinstance.tld/c/communityname
There is already a way to make universal links that has been discovered. Instead of the hyperlink, put (/c/community@instance.tdl). This makes it so no matter what instance you have an account on, the link will always open the community in your Instance, where you can then just subscribe. No need to copy the URL or community name back into your home instance nonsense.
Using my PlayStation 5 community that I mod as an example, here is an example of the current link handling:
And this is how it should work in the Universal Link Format:
For apps (at least for Jerboa which is what I use), neither of these links work properly. The first kicks you out of the app into the web browser, the second links you to a random other discussion. At least it work on the website.
I would love to see the sorting split up so you have a criteria and timeline. Specifically I’d love to be able to look at things like most comments past day or even limiting hot to newer posts.
Your points are all valid. I think at this moment, with Mastodon and Lemmy became very usable and pretty comparable to their centralized counterpart, all other minor platforms should be supported more. Funkwhale, for example, feels far behind in term of attention and support but maybe it could be better integrated in Mastodon or Lemmy.
I disagree. I think there are still enough major improvements to make before the platforms can become big enough that rather than splintering the development efforts it would be a much better idea to focus on core functionality like improving how activitypub is implemented.
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