Title is a bit of a loaded question but I tried to fit it into one sentence.
Do you think Lemmy’s search and use functions are hurt by all the communities that were made and abandoned during the 2023 Redditfugee influx? As in, do you think that Lemmy would be better off if some of these communities were consolidated into larger general pages until it gets a big enough user base to warrant individual communities for specific TV shows, for example.
Thank you for this. I know these kinds of resources exist, and I even occasionally remember to make use of them :)
What I’m suggesting is that lemmy (and the community as a whole) would benefit from baking this functionality into the clients (including the web front ends if that’s a big chunk of the user base).
Discoverability is always a problem. Even centralized services such as Reddit have issues - I was still discovering new communities pretty much until the day I left after being on there since Alien Blue came out. It’s worse in decentralized communities because of the nature of the beast. Back in the Usenet days, it was considered a point of pride to know enough to find niche newsgroups, and even ones like alt.hack felt exclusive. Most of it passed around by word of mouth.
Even though the Usenet-like aspects of lemmy give it advantages over centralized sites like Reddit, I think we’ve learned enough over the last 30 years or so that we know user experience is absolutely critical if you want a popular service. I’m going to hazard a guess that when the big, well funded apps start to federate, they’re going to have those kinds of features built in. I’d rather see some of the smaller developers roll out features like that first, so that they can continue to be competitive (as AB and later on Apollo were for Reddit).