Also, it is a little-known fact that Tuvix actually had a third, more... fluffy counterpart buried inside of their "pairing":-).
Which means that at least once Janeway has killed this cat. And parallel Janeways definitely more than once.
Damn, this kitty gets around!:-P
Bonus points for including the link to memory alpha - I think that means that you get to be added to the pattern buffer twice:-).
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.
What they say: why doesn't anyone want to work these days?
What I see: it's cold, and raining, and wondering do they offer "health insurance" with a high deductible that is next to having none? (yeah I'm in the USA, how could you tell?:-P)
For anyone that needs the YouTube link (from which you can convert to whatever): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os0zmiMfRjM.
John, the disciple whom Jesus loved...
Ooh this comment is going to get you added to the pattern buffer.
Also my reply too.
Also, anyone who (a) reads these, or (b) does not read these. In fact,
(Bc if Miles is going to suffer, he's at least not going to do it alone:-P)
(1) I don't know for some of them, possibly not
(2) I don't know if you've noticed but... Reddit has changed from what it used to be 😜
(3) One I know uses Reddit, but argued that the niche subs over there are fine - like maybe ones dedicated to a single game. Those likely escaped much of the controversy that we over here talk about happening in the big subs. I still left mine - bc fuck spez, and more importantly what he tried to do to 3rd party app devs, plus what that means for the platform in the long run, but if we are talking "mainstream" people here... they stayed, and like it more than they don't like it. It takes all kinds, to fill a ~~world~~ social media platform.
(4) "political" aside, I'm talking about extremist content, that advocates for literal murder, see e.g. some comments in here, which you may ofc argue that "it's only joking", but (a) no, it's really not, and anyway (b) that's besides the point bc it's more about how people are receiving such messages, and deciding to leave Lemmy rather than stay (more commentary here)
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.
Excellent references!
Btw, this article seems to perfectly describe the effects you are mentioning, e.g.:
That same attitude contributed to the development of an appallingly toxic and hostile culture online: As more people – many with silently held prejudices – flocked to a place where allegedly nothing mattered, they let themselves loose, flinging typo-ridden bigotry at any target that they could find. While the sentiments were occasionally decried and the writing errors were sometimes corrected, the retort of “It’s the Internet! Nobody cares!” was wielded with nearly constant frequency. There were certainly oases of reasonable and well-composed discourse… but as their populations grew, so did the volume of posts and comments that were offered from positions of apathy and ignorance.
.. Before long, accuracy, quality, and correctness became optional requirements, and online audiences learned to expect mostly low-effort content instead of refined assemblages. ...We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful (yet are somehow still poorly written). When we amplify these things – using our likes, upvotes, retweets, and shares – we encourage the creation of more low-effort content, and in so doing, we send the message that higher-quality offerings are unwelcome and unwanted. That above-mentioned message isn’t necessarily what we intend, but it’s nonetheless what we say: Positive responses of any variety communicate more than just “I like this;” they also serve to mean “other people should see this” and “more of this, please.” The other implication, then, is that things which receive less attention – if only because they would have taken more effort to consume – aren’t as deserving of it. We may even state as much directly, downvoting or dismissing submissions that irritate us by either asking for too much of our time or challenging our expectations. In the end, the unified statement which arises from all of our indirectly expressed preferences is that only low-effort content will be accepted.
It is a fantastic article and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Edit: also it helps explain why this isn't a problem seen merely with Reddit, but also Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, and yes Lemmy (+Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks) too - it's apparently rooted in human nature, thus would require enormous pushback to try to counter, while in contrast monetary profits tend to go along with whatever most easily aligns with our most basal natures. Sex sells, greed moar so, but laziness most of all.