Why doesn't lemmy show communities in the 'all' section unless people from your server are already subscribed to him? (unilem.org)

submitted 1 year ago by bobman@unilem.org to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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It's excruciatingly obnoxious to have to rely on third party sources for what should be a first-party feature.

Like, I select all and then search a query. "Oh no, nobody on your server used a third party service to find it, so you won't see it here."

Like, how short-sighted is that, really? If I search for a string in the 'all' servers, I should have a list of 'all' the servers containing that string.

It's a really simple concept. Not sure why this post even has to be made, but I'm wondering if there's something I can do to make these 'features' more intuitive.

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[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What does 'All' mean to you?

In this context it means all posts which are stored on the server you are on. And only things are stored which people subscribed to. It does not mean "‘all’ servers".

There are good reasons why the protocol has been designed like that, if you're interested then you can find out about it. If not, reddit still exists for people who like it more.

[-] Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago

All means all. If it isn’t actually All (it isn’t) then it should be called something else.

[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 13 points 1 year ago

But it is all, just not the all you think, it's all things the server is aware of, not all things in the universe.

[-] Zetaphor@zemmy.cc 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is not obvious to anyone who doesn't have some understanding of how networking and federation work, which is most people. Especially if we're talking about users who have only ever experienced centralized platforms.

It should be called "Known Network" or something more transparent that doesn't require an explanation of indexing

[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 1 points 1 year ago

I agree. But the attitude of those users just ribbs me the wrong way.

[-] Zetaphor@zemmy.cc 6 points 1 year ago

It's an understandable response. They were previously in a position where this was such an obvious concept that it didn't merit any thought, and now they are required to have an understanding of networking and federation in order to understand how well actually this a fundamental part of how distributed systems work and isn't technically a bug.

From their perspective this seems like a fairly straightforward problem. Obviously (to us) it's not, but the threshold for the fediverse shouldn't be that you deeply understand federation if there's ever going to be meaningful adoption.

As an aside, your personal domain is timing out.

[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 0 points 1 year ago

Damn, thanks, I have a bad implementation of getting Twitter avatars and now that Twitter redirects everything which is not logged in my implementation goes into redirect hell every time someone opens a page with a Twitter comment. Perhaps I'll find the time tonight to look for a fix.

[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 0 points 1 year ago

It seems I was able to fix it by adding curl.max_redirects = 3 to my caching code. No idea why it would hang without it because it gets the image from Twitter just fine now too.

[-] bobman@unilem.org -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Uh... no it's not.

I'm sorry, but what you're doing is actively making this service harder to use by suggesting that 'all' should only mean 'the communities other community members have subscribed to that contain that string.'

Where do the community members even find the the ones to subscribe to? Oh, they use a third-party service or 'just know' because... whatever reason.

Gee, fediverse design strikes again. Sorry, it has to be said. It really does.

[-] TheInsane42@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Internet also has all information made available to it, not all information that is in the universe. Same as the fediverse users, internet users rely on search engines to find what they are looking for.

When all would mean all available in fediverse you would get issues:

even the smallest instance would explode like lemmy.world
to much choice makes people freeze up
you'd get reddit/facebook all over again. (with the required corporate mess as you need to play loads of employers to support the environment to supply the intel to the bubble that wants it)

It's to the user to search what he wants to see. I for one have 3 'main' accounts (world, ml and studio) and I subscribe to specific communities for each account (ml for development, studio for music related, world for 'rest') and each one I open the feed with subscribed. I'm totally not interested in all, to much junk (even on Lemmy).

To freely quote: All, you want all? You can't handle all. ;)

[-] bobman@unilem.org -2 points 1 year ago

I cannot believe you're making this argument.

I'm sorry, I can, and it's a big reason why fediverse design has a lot of progress to make.

[-] TheInsane42@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I can't believe this reaction. You sound like you think CompuServ was internet and got replaced by Google. (or even didn't now the time before Google)

I admit that it would be nice to have a list of all available communities when looking at the all list in the communities section. When federating with another node, don't get everything, just the community list or the other node so people can subscribe when they want to. But it's just a nice to have, not a huge issue worth stating that 'a lot' is needed.

There were (and still are) separate communities before digg and reddit, the latter got to big for their own good and now the federated solution has nodes with a few to a lot of communities. It's a nice balance between the fragmented communities before the big corporation invasion and the colossal sites. Pick what you like and when you like the Reddit setup, they're still alive. (although the content quality is dropping fast)

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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023

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