Thank you for the well thought out reply! I understand now that its not the way Lemmy devs envision this particular part of the fediverse to develop. It doesn’t completely agree with what I see in the current federation landscape though: Most communities cluster around shared interest, be they language, nsfw vs non-nsfw or ideology. Following that, there is a clustering effect regarding the communities on each instance: If I find an instance with a community I care about I’m pretty likely to be interested in the other communities on there too. My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads. But I get the “idiomatic” argument and understand why Jerboa devs are unlikely to want this feature.
All fair enough. I’m not real convinced about this though:
My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads.
I suspect some app does do this already, some definitely have ways to interact with specific instances while logged out of them. I have 6 lemmy apps or PWAs installed just to keep up with new developments there… but I couldn’t tell you the differences in community discovery between them because the federation and instance discovery problems make it unrelentingly terrible on all of them when compared to lemmyverse.net, which already supports browsing communities by instance.
While I would love for in-app discovery to be good, the journey from where we are to where lemmyverse.net is is long enough that I don’t really see any intermediate hacks as being app-defining.
Thank you for the well thought out reply! I understand now that its not the way Lemmy devs envision this particular part of the fediverse to develop. It doesn’t completely agree with what I see in the current federation landscape though: Most communities cluster around shared interest, be they language, nsfw vs non-nsfw or ideology. Following that, there is a clustering effect regarding the communities on each instance: If I find an instance with a community I care about I’m pretty likely to be interested in the other communities on there too. My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads. But I get the “idiomatic” argument and understand why Jerboa devs are unlikely to want this feature.
All fair enough. I’m not real convinced about this though:
I suspect some app does do this already, some definitely have ways to interact with specific instances while logged out of them. I have 6 lemmy apps or PWAs installed just to keep up with new developments there… but I couldn’t tell you the differences in community discovery between them because the federation and instance discovery problems make it unrelentingly terrible on all of them when compared to lemmyverse.net, which already supports browsing communities by instance.
While I would love for in-app discovery to be good, the journey from where we are to where lemmyverse.net is is long enough that I don’t really see any intermediate hacks as being app-defining.