One REALLY super nice feature of PieFed is that the sidebar text is shown underneath EVERY single post. Lemmy does not do that, and especially some apps almost look like they are doing their best to outright hide that information for some reason, putting it many clicks away!?
Imagine seeing a post on All, and knowing what the exact and entire set of rules are, prior to posting (including a reply to a post, as you said a drive-by).
To be fair, someone does have to scroll down to see it. But at least it’s right there on the same page, not some whole other page entirely and buried many clicks away besides (going back and forth to writing a message that way, checking specific acronyms in the sidebar area, can get really annoying that way! in those apps that do it that way I mean, while in a browser you basically would need to open up a new tab, one for the post and a separate one for the community).
At least this seems like it would help reduce such effects? Maybe? Alternately, these feeds are basically like meta-communities themselves, created (and maintained?) by a “moderator”, so perhaps if someone did not want their community included (which seems to run counter to how many communities would want to increase rather than decrease their discoverability), they could write to the “mod” to ask that it be removed?
Alternately, perhaps communities themselves should have a “private” setting. Lemmy already has a “local-only” setting along those lines. I remember that Reddit has a bunch of opt-in features regarding discoverability, but all of this in both Lemmy and PieFed is extremely primitive in comparison. At least PieFed is moving quickly with adding new features, so for it even if not for Lemmy, there is a strong hope to see all of this that we are talking about!:-)
Communities want more discoverability to get more members that post relevant things. This does the opposite and actively hides the specific community from potential posters while increasing the noise in the comments.
I think people really need to have some serious thought about the consequences of what they are asking for. These feeds, similar to algorithmic recommendations of commercial social media, increase engagement (a dubious metric, primarily interesting for advertisers) but not discoverability.
In one sense this does nothing that other avenues don’t already.
But I do start to see what you mean. Making communities available not just individually but en mass like this will encourage people to not read the side-bar text of each specific community, to see how e.g. its goals may not be aligned with all the other echo chambers and/or debate clubs present in the Fediverse, and instead start treating all communities within a feed as being equally the same.
A fact which PieFed worsens by not describing well the community name. e.g. you may read “c/Fediverse” - but what is that really? Several clicks away, possibly having to go all the way to the home instance in some cases where the short nickname doesn’t match the longer one (and all the more so if there are spaces within the latter), you may find that it means something like [email protected] - but just reading “c/Fediverse” isn’t enough to be able to tell that apart from some other c/Fediverse somewhere else.
Except you can, by simply clicking the post. Not on the feed page, but in the individual post, at the top you can see the full community name - e.g. this example shows Home -> Topics -> Fediverse -> [email protected].
And then as you scroll down, you can read the exact side-bar text, with all the explanation, rules, list of moderators, engagement stats, etc., like the one above begins with:
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s (sic) related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
And then further below that, a list of Related communities, which I’m not sure but perhaps those are the ones that define that Topic?
So all the information that I think you were wanting people to have access to is there, not on the Topic/Feed page themselves but rather on the individual posts.
Though you are probably right that it could increase more naive engagement, by people who don’t read things. Still, this is a new feature that was not available before, and when even newer features continue to be added it will get better still, like if a setting could be added by a moderator of a community to indicate a desire for it not to be included in such multi-communities. Although even the latter may want to be not a hard cutoff and rather a double-check label - perhaps an example could be a community welcoming to trans people first and about technology second, so it should not be conjoined into a multi-community for technology feeds, yet it may be fine to combine it along with other trans communities? Also, if a particular user wants to make like 5 feeds for their own personal usage, and they have put in the effort to read about each one individually, then this feature is very useful for such a person. (Edit: this one not for the sake of discoverability, but for utility. Although if the person making these feeds does their job well, and does not inappropriately add communities that don’t want to be added, then it would help others for discoverability too.)
Even while people may also use it naively as well, yes. On the other hand, there are fewer than 300 people that use PieFed (see stats), so the immediate effect likely will not be overwhelming, and there is time to add new features before PieFed becomes more mainstream.
Words have a meaning you know? “Discoverability” comes from “discover”, which discribes an act of looking for something and not having something pushed into your field of view with minimal own effort.
This is what I was referring to, your understanding is distorted because BOTH fall under the discoverability. You’re bending the reality around you so that it fits your agenda ignoring literally anything that is said to you. The communities aren’t forced upon you either as it’s you choosing which feeds you follow the exact same way posts are added to a community you follow so they’re not forced upon you buddy. Or what, should we get rid of communities as well? XDD Let’s go back to microblogging where we can scream into the void that we can’t navigate through due to almost nothing of organisation besides the tags maybe that can’t even be moderated unlike communities/feeds. I guess we should get rid of the concept of tags too given your perspective on organisaton and discoverability of things you’re interested in? Some of your points are valid but a lot of them are incoherent and ignore reality. Some of the suggestions are terrible for everyone out there too due to ignoring of that reality. I’d work great if the world worked the way you perceive it through your mind though.
One REALLY super nice feature of PieFed is that the sidebar text is shown underneath EVERY single post. Lemmy does not do that, and especially some apps almost look like they are doing their best to outright hide that information for some reason, putting it many clicks away!?
Imagine seeing a post on All, and knowing what the exact and entire set of rules are, prior to posting (including a reply to a post, as you said a drive-by).
To be fair, someone does have to scroll down to see it. But at least it’s right there on the same page, not some whole other page entirely and buried many clicks away besides (going back and forth to writing a message that way, checking specific acronyms in the sidebar area, can get really annoying that way! in those apps that do it that way I mean, while in a browser you basically would need to open up a new tab, one for the post and a separate one for the community).
At least this seems like it would help reduce such effects? Maybe? Alternately, these feeds are basically like meta-communities themselves, created (and maintained?) by a “moderator”, so perhaps if someone did not want their community included (which seems to run counter to how many communities would want to increase rather than decrease their discoverability), they could write to the “mod” to ask that it be removed?
Alternately, perhaps communities themselves should have a “private” setting. Lemmy already has a “local-only” setting along those lines. I remember that Reddit has a bunch of opt-in features regarding discoverability, but all of this in both Lemmy and PieFed is extremely primitive in comparison. At least PieFed is moving quickly with adding new features, so for it even if not for Lemmy, there is a strong hope to see all of this that we are talking about!:-)
Communities want more discoverability to get more members that post relevant things. This does the opposite and actively hides the specific community from potential posters while increasing the noise in the comments.
I think people really need to have some serious thought about the consequences of what they are asking for. These feeds, similar to algorithmic recommendations of commercial social media, increase engagement (a dubious metric, primarily interesting for advertisers) but not discoverability.
In one sense this does nothing that other avenues don’t already.
But I do start to see what you mean. Making communities available not just individually but en mass like this will encourage people to not read the side-bar text of each specific community, to see how e.g. its goals may not be aligned with all the other echo chambers and/or debate clubs present in the Fediverse, and instead start treating all communities within a feed as being equally the same.
A fact which PieFed worsens by not describing well the community name. e.g. you may read “c/Fediverse” - but what is that really? Several clicks away, possibly having to go all the way to the home instance in some cases where the short nickname doesn’t match the longer one (and all the more so if there are spaces within the latter), you may find that it means something like [email protected] - but just reading “c/Fediverse” isn’t enough to be able to tell that apart from some other c/Fediverse somewhere else.
Except you can, by simply clicking the post. Not on the feed page, but in the individual post, at the top you can see the full community name - e.g. this example shows Home -> Topics -> Fediverse -> [email protected].
And then as you scroll down, you can read the exact side-bar text, with all the explanation, rules, list of moderators, engagement stats, etc., like the one above begins with:
And then further below that, a list of Related communities, which I’m not sure but perhaps those are the ones that define that Topic?
So all the information that I think you were wanting people to have access to is there, not on the Topic/Feed page themselves but rather on the individual posts.
Though you are probably right that it could increase more naive engagement, by people who don’t read things. Still, this is a new feature that was not available before, and when even newer features continue to be added it will get better still, like if a setting could be added by a moderator of a community to indicate a desire for it not to be included in such multi-communities. Although even the latter may want to be not a hard cutoff and rather a double-check label - perhaps an example could be a community welcoming to trans people first and about technology second, so it should not be conjoined into a multi-community for technology feeds, yet it may be fine to combine it along with other trans communities? Also, if a particular user wants to make like 5 feeds for their own personal usage, and they have put in the effort to read about each one individually, then this feature is very useful for such a person. (Edit: this one not for the sake of discoverability, but for utility. Although if the person making these feeds does their job well, and does not inappropriately add communities that don’t want to be added, then it would help others for discoverability too.)
Even while people may also use it naively as well, yes. On the other hand, there are fewer than 300 people that use PieFed (see stats), so the immediate effect likely will not be overwhelming, and there is time to add new features before PieFed becomes more mainstream.
That’s some really distorted understanding of “discoverability” that you have in your head. Sorry for your loss. :(
Words have a meaning you know? “Discoverability” comes from “discover”, which discribes an act of looking for something and not having something pushed into your field of view with minimal own effort.
This is what I was referring to, your understanding is distorted because BOTH fall under the discoverability. You’re bending the reality around you so that it fits your agenda ignoring literally anything that is said to you. The communities aren’t forced upon you either as it’s you choosing which feeds you follow the exact same way posts are added to a community you follow so they’re not forced upon you buddy. Or what, should we get rid of communities as well? XDD Let’s go back to microblogging where we can scream into the void that we can’t navigate through due to almost nothing of organisation besides the tags maybe that can’t even be moderated unlike communities/feeds. I guess we should get rid of the concept of tags too given your perspective on organisaton and discoverability of things you’re interested in? Some of your points are valid but a lot of them are incoherent and ignore reality. Some of the suggestions are terrible for everyone out there too due to ignoring of that reality. I’d work great if the world worked the way you perceive it through your mind though.