When making a new post, I often can't remember right away which community it would be most relevant to. Sometimes it's pretty obvious, but other times I have to scroll through the list and find the one I'm looking for or one that might be a good fit.

Now, I know that there are specific communities like !community_community@slrpnk.net that is for this purpose as well, but I was wondering if it would be useful to have a simple automated solution sort of like how github searches for issues to see if your question (post) has already been asked.

I'd be curious to know other's thoughts on the matter and if you think something like this could be a helpful addition or not.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

PieFed also offers pre-built categories of communities, although if I'm understanding correctly that an individual, non-admin user of Tesseract can make their own, then I much prefer that approach! (PieFed seems controlled only at the admin level, so I've seen different categories on different instances, but an individual non-admin user cannot engage with such directly)

Does Tesseract start off with an initial set of pre-built categories? Is that those "other... communities" list, and who makes those - the admin to start but then capable of being modified by the user? PieFed does allow you to unsubscribe from individual communities within the categories, and you can subscribe to communities not in categories, but the latter will be in a generic category rather than one that you choose.

Tesseract seems not intuitive to me (so has a learning curve), but otherwise every single thing I've ever heard about it is so damn impressive!:-)

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Does Tesseract start off with an initial set of pre-built categories?

No, but I've wanted to do something like that (similar to what PieFed does). Just haven't gotten around to it yet. Unfortunately, there's no API support for that in Lemmy, so the instance admins would have to manually populate it.

Tesseract seems not intuitive to me ... learning curve

You're not wrong. Side effect of having so many features and making UI compromises so everything that works on desktop works on mobile (without a dedicated 'mobile' mode) lol.

As I keep adding stuff, the menus get unwieldy so I have to come up with new ways to expose the features. Lately, I've settled on interactive modals which has cut the number of menus (and menu items) down considerably. On the other hand, I have practically no user guide docs, only admin/setup docs, so that is something I can work on to hopefully make it more approachable.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

Your dedication is impressive all on its own:-). I cannot begin to imagine how difficult it must be to balance all of those types of design decisions, but as you say, you have a long list of things that you want to work through already, and keeping it "intuitive" is merely one among many other tasks, made all the more expensive by all the changes over time.

I was also pleased to hear that you would switch to Sublinks when that became available. Unfortunately it looks like that project is stalled a bit, but I hope that when PieFed comes out with an API that Tesseract would also be another way to interact with that backend as well. (But if not, it's understandable - Sublinks was designed to be intercompatible with Lemmy, while PieFed is a whole other thing - so I'm not even "pushing" in the slightest, just expressing a naive hope based on no knowledge whatsoever of what various factors are involved!)

Thanks for the insight here, and for your friendliness in keeping the Fediverse running, making it a bit less hostile than it would otherwise feel without all of your contributions:-).