rglullis

Too much time living in Germany, sorry. ;)

Seriously, though... Look at the submission:

• it starts with a coward's version of an imperative ("needs to fix") in the title. Look around and you will see plenty of cases of people using this phrasing when they want to give an ultimatum but don't have the means/authority to back it up with a credible threat.
• It goes on to describe the "problem" but stays in the abstract, without ever giving a real example of its consequences or why it should be so important. IOW, it wants to get other people to worry about something that haven't affected them in a meaningful way.
• The most annoying thing of all: the author sees a problem, describes all of the possible solutions, but stays away from showing work done on any of them.

I have all the patience in the world when someone starts an argument from the position of a learner, trying to understand the situation and willing to accept that they are the ones that need to adapt to something new. But when someone starts arguing already from the position of unearned authority (like the title) and wants to turn "their" problem into other people's work, then yes I will respond in this abrasive way.

You repeated the accusation of "not seeing it", misinterpreted what I am saying as "deal with it, it's meant to be hard" when I am actually saying the exact opposite (It does not require a lot of work to figure out "organically" and it is not hard to workaround the issue) and when asked repeatedly for actual instances of this being "a huge usability issue", you run away with some pretentious posturing. That's just lame.

There is a difference between "not seeing the problem" and "asking yourself what are the implications of it". I'm running 15+ instances and I'm running a website that is devoted to help people find the "canonical" community in the fediverse. I can point to dozens of other issues that are a lot more "painful" to me as an user and an instance admin, none of them are related with the "pain of having to choose which community to join or focus".

I'm again going to ask: is there any actual, practical example of this being such a "huge issue"?

federation isn’t perfect

Again: so what? It's reasonably easy to see how different is your view from a given community compared to another instance.

You can’t guarantee that.

You are right. There is no guarantee. That doesn't bother me, and I truly don't understand why it should bother others. I am not going to write only if I am optimizing reach or I know a priori if the people are going to approve.

Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn’t decentralized.

Sorry, your argument is falling to the fallacy that Taleb calls "Thinking in Words". If the system does not depend on a central authority and if the agents are free to talk with each other even when not in the same namespace, then yes, it is decentralized. In practice, there is no actual problem in having large communities belonging to one server. The people are not tied to it, and if the instance controlling the community starts acting malicious or against the interest of the majority, it's easy to coordinate a move away.

Everyone convincing each other in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner.

So when people vote according to what you prefer, it's validation of the problem. When they don't, it's "insanely toxic and dismissive". Surely you see the problem with this line of argument?

Who gives a shit about user experience anyways?

This is a type of "faster horse" case. The fact that so many people are asking for it is just an indication that they are stuck in "centralized system" mentality, not that they are facing a real problem.

there are many communities that died due to lack of traction.

Can you give actual examples where the community died because the people were splintered around? Because from the majority of communities that I see that are dead, they are dead simply for a lack of interest from the people, or the creator just wanted created a quick replica from reddit but never worried about cultivating it.

To illustrate: the Nix community even created a Lemmy instance and announced on Reddit, but it ended up completely dead because the most experienced people ignored are already on Discourse. The newbies here on the Fediverse wanting help knew were to go, but were posting questions and receiving crickets in return. Of course it would die.

Also, something similar to less popular programming languages. I was doing my best to help !elixir@programming.dev to come off the ground, but there simply isn't enough people interested.

What would help is that people stopped trying to find a "canonical place" to put content and just went on to put content without much worry. I have been basically posting on !humanscale@communick.news by myself. Would it be nice if more people posted? Yes. Do you think I will just give up because it's been six months and no one else cared to post there? Of course not.

There are multiple communities?! So what?? "Oh my God, I don't know which one to write!" So what?

This is the type of nerd-sniping "problem" that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.

It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.

Again, this would be in the chance some "conflict" happened.

Do you think it's reasonable that people shouldn't even try to go for the lower-hanging fruit because they see a potential conflict that will lead to some more work?

In the aftermath of what? The community hasn't even formed and you are anxious about an imaginary problem?

Oh, if the community exists already even better.

Sure, but it seems like that the "need" for independence would come only after the community is already established and some type of conflict came up that made it impossible for them to stay in any of the other already-existing instances.

To put in concrete terms: I wouldn't have any problem to create a HP community on a topic-specific instance like https://metacritics.zone. @blue_berry@lemmy.world, would you be interested in that? I can make you mod if you want.

Why does it have to be a whole instance? Why not just create a community for it and start posting content you find interesting?

Ooh, just this week I started toying with a fork of takahe to see if it could be extended beyond microblogging. Some questions:

1. Where have you found a proper documentation of Lemmy's API? All I found on their website was the documentation of the Javascript SDK. If you have something like a Swagger/OpenAPI description of the API, it would help immensely.
2. Why the mix of Java and Go?
3. You mention a new API. Is there any chance that Sublinks could be developed as a more "strict" ActivityPub-compliance system? For example: would it be possible to architect the new features in a way that it only relies on the actor outbox/inbox?

A bit more difficult question: the reason that I was looking at Takahe is because it's the only AP server (that I know of) which supports multiple domains being served from the same instance. For someone providing "managed hosting" like me, it would save me a lot on resources to have one single server for multiple customers instead of having to spawn a new Mastodon server for every one that wants to have their own domain. Is there any "killer feature" on Sublinks planned that you'd say could warrant yet-another tool? Why not contribute to Lemmy instead? Or, if the devs are more experienced with Go, why extend/contribute to GoToSocial?