TLDR: Poor discoverability impedes the threadiverse’s growth by making life hard for new users. Here are some suggestions on how discoverability could be improved.
- Make fediverse-wide search more friendly by hiding complex front-ends and grouping search results by type
- Allow communities to be discovered more easily on unfederated instances via directory services
- Bring over at least some content (last X posts, last Y days, all pinned posts) when first federating communities
- Ideally bring over all content, or find a way for searches and sorts to interrogate the most complete set of community data (likely the data on the community’s original instance)
I’m still learning about how the fediverse works, so if I’ve gotten something wrong in the following discussion (eg terminology, or even a fundamental understanding of federation works), please do correct me. There’s a chance I’m making a total fool of myself with this post, but here goes anyway.
In my opinion fundamental to the popularity of reddit is the ability for anyone to create niche communities. That’s what set reddit apart from predecessors like slashdot or digg, where there were only a small number of pre-determined categories, like tech, politics or gaming.
Critically, reddit it makes it very easy for new users to:
- Discover communities tailored to their - even very narrow - set of interests.
- Immediately see what people are talking about in their chosen community, ie to show it is active.
- See what people had been talking about, ie to surface high quality content
The fediverse is poor at all three of these discoverability features.
I have four suggestions on how these issues might be fixed which are summarised above. I’ll post these in separate comments as the post would otherwise be too long.
(By the way, I’m generally going to use the term “community” to describe both lemmy communities and kbin magazines, simply because I think “community” is more descriptive. Similarly, “posts” will generally refer to a mix of threads, articles, comments, replies etc.)
Assuming my understanding of how the fediverse works (as I said, I’m still learning, having only heard the word fediverse for the first time a few weeks ago) isn’t too far out of whack with reality, I’m guessing these solutions may all be various degrees of difficult to implement. And not necessarily implementable at the individual instance (kbin.social, startrek.website) level, or threadiverse software level (kbin, lemmy), but perhaps requiring thought and application at the ActivityPub protocol level.
But I believe that making threadiverse communities and content more easily discoverable by new users will be critical in growing the fediverse overall.
3. BRING OVER SOME CONTENT WHEN FIRST FEDERATING COMMUNITIES
When an instance first federates a community, it should bring across at very least the last (let’s say) 100 threads or the last (let’s say) 7 day’s worth of threads from that community (plus associated comments), whichever is greater.
This will prevent the following scenario: A user finds a community that’s hosted on another instance, joins the community, but then finds no evidence of activity on their instance, because when an instance federates a community, it only starts pulling across posts from that moment in time. It makes it look like the community is dead, even if it isn’t. While there may be a “Browse this community on the original instance” message, but that may well confuse people, and it doesn’t mitigate the initial impression that the community has not posts.
Related to this - any pinned posts from a community should also be brought across by default, as these posts often contain information that a new user will find useful or that the moderators want all users to be aware of.
4. IDEALLY BRING OVER (OR ALLOW TO BE SEARCHED/SORTED) ALL CONTENT WHEN FEDERATING COMMUNITIES
The shelf life of posts in most communities is pretty short. If you subscribe to /news it probably doesn’t matter if you can’t see the top-ranked post from three years ago. But other communities curate content that has a much longer shelf life. A community like /askhistorians for instance, or /buyitforlife, where a user might want to search the archives for a great overview on the events leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall, or recommendations for the best compression socks. Allowing new users to search the complete history of a community, or sort posts by something like “most upvoted by all time”, makes the community more useful.
So ideally if you subscribe to a community hosted on another instance on your home instance you should be able to browse/search/sort that community’s entire archive.
I know you can click a link to browse a community on the original instance, but that can be confusing because suddenly you are now browsing on a site where you do not have an account.
Copying over the entire database for a community has storage/bandwidth implications (although I would argue data consumption issues are inherent to the fediverse model, which could lead to another discussion around the fediverse’s scalability limitations). But perhaps there is a way for searches and sorts to interrogate the host instance of a community (which presumably has the most complete database) rather than the local instance.