I think both types of community can have a value. Being general as in “all things can fit here” and in “only things that are general to programming”.

I didn't think of that.

I have no experience in community management so take my words with a huge grain of salt.

Same here

the hurdle of posting stuff, the and to enter these communities for people might get higher. As a newbie, (either to programming or just to talking on these platforms) you might be intimidated to post to a group of experts.

I think there should be a balance. It might not be ok to lmgtfy people in communities like /c/learn-programming, but it should be fine in others. Just to enforce basic etiquette like googling for a few minutes, or reading the community rules before posting.

So again I see benefits to both approaches. Maybe we just need both. Make a “computer science” community, advertise it on this community, and make it focussed on concepts, papers and the generic programming stuff. Filter the “patch notes” stuff out from there. And this community here could then be the catchall “landing-page” thing. There will be suff for everyone, but not all of it. There will be some general posts and some specifics. And hopefully we can find methods that people find their more specific communities if they have more specific stuff to share or ask.

Great points. /c/computer-science does sound really nice.

What about adding a guideline over here along the lines of:

if your post is specific to only one programming language or tool,
it should be something that's interesting,
otherwise check out our [community list] or [local community search engine],
and if the community exists, post over there to get better feedback`

(add a list of programming related communities in the sidebar)
(maybe also write it as faux code, and turn it into ascii art, 
it would help catch attention)

That would limit automated style patch notes to affected communities. So "node version x patch notes" is not fine, but it would be fine to post "node finally supports tail recursion optimization" and just link the patch notes.

People could redirect posts that should be in specific communities, so for example:

"How do i x in python?" -> /c/python, "Should i x in Js" -> /c/javascript, "What first language/editor?" -> goto /c/learn-programming, "how do i keep warm in the winter?" -> /c/intellij

That would help grow those communities, and over here those posts would be filtered out by both active and hot.

It would be fine to post like: "emacs does something really cool", "c# binary makes atoms look fat!", "does rust make lemmy go FASTA?!?!!"

And it would preserve the general mood with posts like: "fav programming music?", "programming and humility", "is chatgpt cheating?" as they're not specific to any language

Sorry, I got a bit rambly in my stream-of-conciousness post here. Hopefully you can get anything from it. I am not sure :)

right back at you, and thanks, this was fun