Aa!

I want an instance already established, very populated, and proven to last long term, so I don’t have to create another account

The browser solves the problem of not having any open API. Each platform wants to handle things in its own way, and the browser is the perfect way to do that. Each service, including both the open and the proprietary ones, can present the feed in the way that they decide is right. The browser already does handle rudimentary account management via form auto fill, as well as a unified notification system.

But as for a unified feed… I think the best example is the issues with that come from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Mastodon posts have a different mentality than Lemmy posts do, not to mention with structure of responses. I just don’t think it does us any favors to have them share the same feed. Now we have replies that have a clear structure of who they are responding to, but Mastodon users come in adding the user tag into the comment, which is messy at best, and bordering obnoxious at worst.

But I get it, I’m not the audience you’re looking to cater to. I don’t particularly understand the value of RSS readers at all, because I just go directly to the services I want to see the feeds from. Hell, I don’t even use bookmarks. I type in the web address for my services every time

Isn’t this what a web browser already does?

Yes, if you want to see Hackernews posts, get them from Hackernews yourself. Reposting to Lemmy just adds more posts with zero engagement that new users will see and be put off of the site for

Several months ago we had three different instances with their own Hackernews communities and their own repost bots posting the exact same things, with zero discussion.

Lemmy needs more actual discussion, and fewer bots adding noise to the feed.

A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.

Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.

Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.

Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.

The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in

Also the sorting could be better.

I think there should be tags for communities and separately, tags for posts within a community.

But I am thinking of Reddit’s style of tags, where they are not used like Mastodon, they are just used to identify a general topic or classification of a post within a community.

The idea would be to give end users more information they can use to filter posts or communities, rather than to help people discover posts.