Discoverability in this context meaning the ability to more effectively find public communities/people of interest. Alongside improving this however, respecting people’s decisions on whether and how they may be found, if at all.
I think the idea of having instances own communities is fundamentally flawed. Discoverability is one of many ways that fucks things up.
Yeah. This is the biggest one I think. Theoretically a community can be shared by all instances and each instance decide if they want to receive this post and this comment from that community. This way, there could be a community that have totally different meaning in two different instances, but it’s still one name so it’s discoverable.
Although it seems like it’ll be too granular. But it’ll be funny seeing “This post is banned in 69 instances”.
Lemmy has this feature request, so did kbin and subsequently mbin. I think @Ategon@programming.dev implemented something similar with his own fork (?). But yes, multi-community / community grouping / publishing groups / groups / whatever are sorely needed. Having a “technology” community on multiple instances that one needs to first find and then subscribe to is a little tedious and doesn’t help discoverability.
I added a feature to Tesseract UI a while back that lets you browse other instances and resolve/subscribe to communities mostly transparently. It’s been extremely helpful, but there’s room for improvement. Still, I’d like to see that added to other frontends.
My improvement plan for that is to utilize the data dumps from the Lemmyverse explorer (https://lemmyverse.net/communities) so that the UI can have fediverse-wide (more or less) community searching. Sadly, that’s been on the back burner for some time.
I’ve been finding discoverability pretty good on Lemmy, but maybe that’s in part because the server I picked grew to be the largest not long after. Mastodon and the various microblog workalikes seem to have bigger problems there.
- Backfill statuses when loading profiles from remote servers (Mastodon and workalikes)
- Full text search, on by default, without a heavyweight dependency (Mastodon-specific)
- Relay replies to all participants in a conversation (Mastodon)
- An optional recommended feed with an algorithm (I know that’s a bad word!) based on favorites and boosts by people who often favorite/boost the same things you do
Word of mouth, (social) networking and search functionality. And I think Mastodon as it’s focused on people, and Lemmy which is focused on topics, require different handling. There are a few articles out there outlining that Stephen Fry and a few other famous people are on Mastodon. I’m not sure how someone would recommend me my favorite blogger and YouTube stars though, without me searching or clicking on a link next to their content… I think Lemmy is pretty alright. You can enter a term in the search bar and it’ll show you the communities with that in the name. Or related posts. Also there are a few websites with listings and directories of communities. The UI could be better though, for example show other communities on cross-posts or include related communities in the sidebar…
And the “proper” way to do it would be to implement what commercial platforms do. Track the users, learn about their interests, have an “algorithm” that gives good recommendations.
I think perfect discoverability is a property of centralized systems and that we need to be extremely careful when working on this problem so that we don’t lose sight of why the Fediverse was created.
The Fediverse was created for connectivity and relationships that are yours not being owned by Big Social. It wasn’t created as some privacy preserving and secure platform, people on Mastodon have pushed that but the spec is not fundamentally built on those things nor have any of the founders of the fedi ever really pushed that.
Sidebar on every instance offering a link to the lemmy most subscribed community list. Unless users can easily see what other people are interested in organizing around, new voids entirely absent of activity will continue to pop up.
Hashtags have been pretty helpful to me on Mastodon. If people tag their stuff with the tags I follow I get a chance to see me stuff and follow new people organically, while people who didn’t want to be discovered never hit my radar. Making that kind of topic tagging easier for people to apply might be useful, as I’ve seen new arrivals to the Fediverse who can’t figure out why nobody sees them until someone tells them to tag their stuff.
An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.
I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.
It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.
I’m of course biased, but I think that my approach on fediverser could pretty much solve issues of content discovery if more instances were willing to adopt it.
If we take as a given that most people coming to Fediverse already had an account on Reddit (and/or Twitter, Instagram, etc), then we can leverage the information they have on those platforms and use it during the registration to onboarding the user on Lemmy (and/or Mastodon/Pleroma, PixelFed, respectively)
