AtomHeartFather

I’m just an old guy with a lot of opinions. I am a sysadmin by trade. I like Linux, cool gadgets, Sci-Fi, DC comics, bass guitar, prog rock/metal, and annoying my kids with dumb dad jokes.

  • 3 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • Honestly, I hope not.

    For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

    There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that’s what should happen.




  • 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.



  • I tried doing that with a previously unsearched/unsubscribed community as a test on my own instance, and I got a 404: couldnt_find_community error when clicking the link. As you stated, it seems like in most cases that special link will not work unless someone has previously manually searched for the same community in your instance.

    I think I’d rather link directly to the instance for the community than get a 404 error. For most people, getting the 404 will just deter them from proceeding further.

    Perhaps it would be best to include both links in a post?