both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.
so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.
it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?
If you see it a few times, are you not going to notice intuitively how it works? Also, even if you don’t use a ! link, usually people with comment with one
Piefed is in Python, Mbin in PHP, Sublinks in Java. It’s more about the lack of contributors than the languages themselves
Not everyone is tech savvy, e.g. creative writers who know how to work the English language rather than coding ones, like maybe poets.
And no I don’t think the exclamation mark followed by community name syntax is intuitive in the slightest (edit: whoopsie, see below, but TLDR I was half-wrong i.e. not correct on this point) - for one thing it runs entirely counter to how username tagging works, and for another if you allow the UI to guide you then it will give the wrong answer, so these “pitfalls” act as barriers to learning, which imho are the polar opposite of “intuitive”, for this matter. Instead, I end up memorizing three rules (usernames are like so, community links similarly are… NOPE, that’s a trap!, and instead here’s how community links actually go…)
Excellent point about the non-Lemmys - those have different barriers I believe. e.g. if you visit the Sublinks demo, there are no posts from sooner than 5 months ago (plus ironically sorting by New shows zero posts, so it seems broken:-). I doubt people are wanting to contribute to a project that isn’t released yet, but then again I can’t ascribe motives to everyone, it just seems to make sense to me that having to learn Rust would be one type of barrier (although not even the major one, since many people may want to do thus for their careers - Rust is arguably the hottest new language right now?), and a project not being able to be used is another type of barrier.
How so? Adding “!test” shows the dropdown menu, that seems quite intuitive :
How would you make it more intuitive?
For Sublinks, if people go on the Github (which you expect people wanting to contribute to do), they’ll see it still has active contributions: https://github.com/sublinks
Edit: Whoopsie - some of this is incorrect, see Blaze’s extremely helpful answer below. Many things on the Fediverse are still not intuitive, but I was mostly incorrect in stating that one of reasons is particularly wrt the dropdown menu.
Try it - you can use me + this back-and-forth as a test platform, or really at any time you can do something and click the “Preview” button to see how it will render before you send it to someone else (I do this anytime I have even the slightest encoding - it really helps to spot e.g. a backwards parenthesis that would have displayed a link rather than the link text:-). Ofc clicking it would destroy your message, so make sure to select open in a new tab, to test how it would work:-).
Basically: yes the dropdown menu appears, just as for usernames, but if you choose the item from the dropdown that you see, the Lemmy UI will do the wrong thing. My first link was made using the dropdown, while my second ignored the dropdown and just used the exclamation mark. Notice how my first link takes you to an entirely different instance? But the second link goes to the version of that community while keeping you on your same instance.
Btw, here is a post that describes all of the variations that you can try - there are more than just these two - and the relative merits of each. I highly recommend that !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca community overall btw!:-)
Oh that reminds me: there is also no possible way to share “post” or “comment” links that will auto-adjust to allow you to remain on your logged-in instance, unlike username, community (despite the dropdown route being broken), and instance links. So what you can do is on your instance click the search button / magnifying glass, then paste in a link, and that should take you right to it.
Except ofc when it does not, although with you being on a major instance there’s an extremely good chance that it will… but not guaranteed. The reason is that there must be someone (else?) from your instance who has subscribed to that community first, for you to be able to see it. And that person must blaze the trail, not merely by clicking around on an existing link, but by piecing together a URL in the proper format (c/communityurlname) and then clicking subscribe, and then waiting for the list of posts to populate over the next several days. Once the first person has blazed the trail, it should work for everyone else much more smoothly, but that trailblazing process is not automated or anywhere close to streamlined. Furthermore, reasons that that might not work is that the “community url name” is not always the same as the “community long-form name” that is displayed at the top of it - those can be different. e.g. an example is “Dungeon RPGs” (a community that I just happened to see one day in the right-hand sidebar of my own instance, discuss.online, and btw it’s not a terribly popular community - to this day I’m literally the only one who has ever posted to it:-D), although the url for the name is not “dungeon rpgs” or “dungeon_rpgs” or some such, but rather “drpg”.
On the other hand, I mentioned that there’s a good chance that it will already work - this is b/c of some seriously irl actual fucking heroes who go around making alts on every major instance, and keep very long lists of every single community that they can find, and subscribe to them. Except… not drpg, so if you attempt to visit https://lemmy.world/c/drpg you will get an error, as if that were an invalid community. It is a valid community though, it is just on a tiny instance that such people have not included in their nets - not that I’m complaining or whatever, just using this as an illustration (the top community on this instance has only 67 users per month, and its url at lemmy.world does not work either, and then the next community after that has only 18 users, and is for a small town:-D so this is a tiny instance, with virtually no actual communities).
Most of these activities, from what I can see, are done by one person, these days at least - Blaze - but like, what if they ever get sick, or lose their job, or get hit by a bus, will all such things on the Fediverse cease functioning in such a horrible scenario? I did see a post asking if people would like a bot that would do this… but even once this particular issue is solved, by a bot, it still will only be a solution for a subset of the issue. e.g. what if someone spins up a fake community, calls it “Kamala Harris rules”, waits for a month and then fills it with child pornography? This sounds like a joke, but people do these kind of things, on purpose, and laugh and laugh about it. But I am not joking when I say that full-on, actual federal fucking agencies - of far more than merely one nation - will find it no laughing matter.
The whole concept of “federation” is exciting… but not terribly polished as of yet. The Lemmy UI comes the closest, having the bulk of the development efforts so far put into it, yet even here it is telling that something as foundational as choosing the dropdown menu for community links results in a URL that takes you away from your instance, when the aforementioned post explaining the URLs makes it look naively to me like a 30s change would have fixed it? (but maybe I’m missing something, if e.g. changing “example.com/c/community” to “/c/community@example.com” would indeed fix it, as it says). Notably in relation to the devs prioritization incentives: if you are a member of lemmy.ml and click a community that is also on lemmy.ml, then you are not affected. Everyone else… can wait until the developers decide to get around to it, one day. Maybe they already have even, and it simply hasn’t made its way around to the rest of the Fediverse yet. But even if so, that still points to how these very foundational matters, about “whether communities show up on your instance or not”, and “sharing a community link” have been broken, all this time. And again, sharing links to individual posts and comments likewise does not work - this time there is no dropdown, there just simply is no possible way for it to work (afaik, and confirmed by e.g. Blaze), without UI changes in the code.
People coming from single-instance platforms - Reddit, Facebook, X/Twitter, etc. - do not expect to see this level of complexity. This is not “intuitive” that you see a URL in your browser, yet when you try to share it to someone else, it does not work as they expect. Mind you, that is understandable - Lemmy’s version is 0.19, notably very far aways from 1.0 - I am just saying that realistically, we have a ways to go for things like that to happen.
How does clicking “preview” destroy your message? I use it regularly, and never encountered this
Jumping in, but I’m very curious about this. I’ve never seen the dropdown menu not create “!community@instance.org” links.
I am now taking my discussion.online alt to see, and with !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, created from the dropdown, the link works as expected.
How do you manage to get harcoded links from the dropdown?
My first link used the dropdown menu. Fwiw, discuss.online says it is using “BE: 0.19.3”. So if I type e.g. exclamation-mark then start typing “newtolemmy…” it will fill in to
[!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca](https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy), and then iirc someone told me to remove the exclamation mark and… omg, it looks like *I* am the one messing these up!? Removing the exclamation mark results in newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, which takes me away from my instance, but leaving it in allows it to work properly.Regardless, that is still NOT intuitive, like AT ALL, b/c the URL makes it visually look like clicking it should go to “https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy”, so what difference should the click-here text make - whether I call it “I am the very model of a major general” or
!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, the URL is what governs where a link goes, literally everywhere I’ve ever seen in the entire internet? (and the[whatever text here](URL goes here)format definitely presents itself as a “link”, not “code that will change the URL endpoint later”)Even so, it seems I have been spreading a bit of misinformation, and I apologize for that.
Most especially for this reason and for so many others, I appreciate you so much, for taking the time to think about and correct me on this score - that is so very helpful, THANK YOU!!!
No worries, happy to help. I guess that might solve some of the issues you detailed in the comment above.
I skimmed through it, but some other points I was a bit confused about
The issue here is not about discuss.online being a small instance, but mostly you not using the URL with the instance name
@OpenStars@discuss.online, have you seen my comment above? I was curious as it seems you were missing how to link to communities on another instance
Ah no I did not see it. Which itself is a bit of an interesting story, but first to stay on-topic here: thank you!:-) It made sense to me that perhaps nobody on Lemmy.World had ever “subscribed” to such a tiny, niche community as drpg (which someone seems to have squatted the rights to, on an instance that barely has any other communities, but then never bothered to so much as post to), but apparently either you or someone else has in fact done just that. I appreciate the correction as to how to get it done.
Now the oddness of why I did not respond: I seem to have feddit.org in my user block list. Likely that was historical b/c I routinely kept blocking new communities constantly as they were formed, so that my All feed would be usable, but no matter how many I kept blocking new ones kept popping up in languages that I could not read. I have been wondering if I should remove that, ever since your earlier comment that those communities may have adjusted their language settings since then. So then this presents a new oddity: apparently people can override a user block, simply by tagging the other person’s name? In your case I actually appreciate it but… overall the potential for abuse does worry me a bit. Not terribly much b/c presumably a user account block would take precedence but still…
On Reddit as a mod I was subjected to some “brigading” attempts - and I actually went to the discord and took screenshots of people calling for such - so the scenario whereby hundreds of different accounts (even if a smaller number of actual people) could continuously barrage someone, represents a very real & distinct possibility in my mind. If you are curious btw, eventually I was vindicated and the person who caused the uproar was banned from the other (~10x-larger) sub, with people apologizing after-the-fact for not researching the issue fully before starting into a flame war, and Reddit admins themselves banned several accounts that this person had created (presumably they were not smart about it and did something like use the same email to sign up for them all, but then broke the rules, several times, to use such accounts to evade prior bans from the sub). It is such experiences that have left me jaded, and realizing that >90% of the problems experienced somewhere usually can be attributed to a single “person” (even if multiple accounts).
Anyway that’s one of the chief reasons that I am enjoying the Fediverse over Reddit: discussing things on a factual basis with people like you is a far cry from dealing with such. Thank you not only for your large efforts to actually improve things where you are at, but also for making this place more worthwhile to visit!:-)
That’s a one-two punch.