this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024

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Minor whinge about the All feed and community building (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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Generally, the lens I've come to criticise any/all fediverse projects is how well they foster community building. One reason why I like and "advocate" for the lemmy/threadiverse side of things is precisely because of this and how the centrality of the community/sub/group is a good way of organising social media (IMO).

Also, because of that, I recently came to be skeptical of the effects that the "All" feed can have. I didn't even realise that people relied mostly on the All feed until recently.

I think I've reached the point now of being against it (at least tentatively). I know, it's a staple and there's no way it's going away. And I know it's useful.

But thinking about the feature set, through the community building lens, I think it'd be fair to say that things are out of balance: they don't promote community building enough while also providing the All feed which dissolves community building.

Not really a criticism of the developers ... AFAIU, the All feed is easier to implement than any other community building feature ... and it's expected from reddit (though it isn't normal on forums AFAICT, which is maybe worth considering for anyone happy to reassess what about reddit is retained and what isn't).

But still, I can imagine a platform that is more focused on communities:

Community explorer tool built in.
- Could even be a substitute for an All feed ... where you can browse through various communities you don't know about and see what they've posted recently
Multi-communities (long time coming by now for many I'd say)
- Could even be part of the community explorer tool where you can create on-the-fly multi-communities to see their posts in a temporary feed
Private and local only communities (already here on lemmy and coming for private communities)
Post visibility options for Public communities (IE, posts that opt-in private)
More flexible notifications for various things/events that happen within a community
Wikis
Chat interface
- I'm thinking this is pretty viable given that Lemmy used to use a web-socket auto-updating design ... add that to the flat chat view and you've got a chat room. There are resource issues, so limiting them to one per community or 6hrs per week per community or something would probably be necessary.

A possibly interesting and frustrating aspect of all of these suggestions/ideas above is I can see their federation being problematic or difficult ... which raises the issue of whether there's serious tension between platform design and protocol capabilities.

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[–] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There are many communities I would have no interest in participating actively, but that I still like to hear about when something big happens. The all feed kinda gives me that sort of experience.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago

I’m aware and don’t challenge this utility. Just questioning the balance.

And by implication raising the possibility that with more community features the All feed would become redundant and could then be removed.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

ALL generates a fair bit of traffic, but the quality of that traffic tends to be beyond shit. It would be nice to be able to set replies of posts to subscribers only.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago

It would be nice to be able to set replies of posts to subscribers only.

Yea ... and this is the kind of antagonism I'm trying to on the table. If it becomes true that features for putting walls between a community and the "All" feed are useful and desirable ... and we don't even have those features, then the balance is surely off, and working toward a situation where we can take the All feed down a worthwhile goal.

Though, whether there's an All or not ... post interaction and visibility controls for any public communities could be quite nice.

[–] MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy just doesn't have enough activity that I can use the subscribed feed and be satisfied.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I get that and it’s the common cause for usage of All I think.

That being said, to push back a little:

All browsing was a thing on Reddit too. So I think it’d be fair to say it’s a style of usage some people just prefer or reach for (whether that applies to you)
Unless one uses “New” or “scaled” sorting, surely it’s the big communities that dominate the All feed such that subscribing could easily achieve the same?
Wouldn’t there be a trade off with interest or relevance being less in the All feed?

This is my experience at least. There’s definitely interesting stuff that pops up, but there’s some I’m not that interested in. If I’m interested, subscribing often makes sense.

For me, and I suspect many, multi-communities would go a long way to helping, as sometimes you don’t really want to subscribe to a community but maybe check in from time to time.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

multi-communities would go a long way to helping, as sometimes you don’t really want to subscribe to a community but maybe check in from time to time.

That's a major point.

I typically want to browse different type of content depending on my mood

Tech, programming, Android, open source
Casual conversations
Learning about things
Content in a specific language
Memes and low effort posts

Without multicommunities, I'm current juggling between several alts to achieve this. It's okayish for me, but I know that can be cumbersome for a lot of people.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yea. It feels like a feature that was due yesterday, especially given that is likely not that hard to implement (and instead got stuck in option paralysis a while ago).

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How is the Rust bookclub going? Could that be something the members could give a try?

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

It’s still going, and yea I’ve thought of that for sure. First cohort (including myself) are finishing The Book.

Thing is, because there’s be a major front end element, it may not be the best for first contributors.

I’d personally be quite happy to hack away at it though.

[–] MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

All browsing was a thing on Reddit too. So I think it’d be fair to say it’s a style of usage some people just prefer or reach for (whether that applies to you)

Sure, for other people, but not me. I never casually browsed r/all. I visited it a couple times, and it was always nonsense I didn't care about. The average Lemmy user is more similar to me than the average Reddit user, so all is usable. Although the average Lemmy user is still a fair bit less similar to me than the average Reddit user of the communities I was subscribed to, so if subscriptions were viable I'd use them on Lemmy too.

Unless one uses “New” or “scaled” sorting, surely it’s the big communities that dominate the All feed such that subscribing could easily achieve the same?

i guess so, but I often scroll long enough to run into the bot-posted reddit reposts with no upvotes, so I'm definitely interested in seeing all the content on Lemmy. Of a more relevant nature is that I don't see posts to remote communities unless a fellow lemmy.ca user is subscribed to them. I ought to subscribe to more remote communities.

Wouldn’t there be a trade off with interest or relevance being less in the All feed?

Sure is, I have no desire to click on about half the posts I see, although that number trends upwards quick when I start scraping the bottom of the barrel. But again, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, so it's not like I'm missing any interesting posts.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

All good. I didn’t want to attack or criticise. Sorry if I was being a dick.

Of a more relevant nature is that I don’t see posts to remote communities unless a fellow lemmy.ca user is subscribed to them. I ought to subscribe to more remote communities.

That makes sense too … All on lemmy world or even lemmy ml might be a different story.

[–] Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Voyager has the community explorer already.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Didn’t know! Is it a link to the lemmy verse explorer page?

[–] Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No, it's just it's own implementation, it lets you view a list of communities I think.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

Yea cool. A basic feature that fetches communities from any/all instances makes sense. But by "explorer", I was thinking of something richer like the lemmyverse explorer page that can give you activity numbers and maybe even a quick preview of the current feed from the community.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think a significant issue here is that Reddit is not built for fostering communities, and things that mimic Reddit will not foster them, either. The whole model is built around an endless number of very large, single subject discussion spaces with functionally no globally consistent moderation or oversight.

This is a model of content categorization and filtering for individual consumption, not community building. Lemmy "communities" are just content tags, they're not real community spaces. They're never going to encourage the kind of tight knit spaces with idiosyncratic customs, rituals, and rules that actual vommunities have. They're never going to let you get to know others because "off topic" discussions are meant to be had in entirely different spaces.

Reddit and reddit-like services are about content creation and delivery, noy community. Thatms baked into the form.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

I see that for sure. Fediverse platforms don’t have to be locked in to mimicking big platforms though. User expectations and habits, frankly, can be a problem with this. Some are interested in experimentation. But if enough are kinda “conservative” about what they want, the devs will naturally not want to take risks.