We need a new Explore-Feed (similar to Mastodon), which consolidates the All- and Local-Feed
We need a new Explore-Feed (similar to Mastodon), which consolidates the All- and Local-Feed
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5038153
The All-Feed is very important to increase the content-quality of the threadiverse and therefore, ensure its existense. However, for smaller instances, there is only limited reason to put the All-Feed prominent in their UI, because their posts will never be present there. However, if they push people toward their the Local-Feed (which they currently do), people will only stay on their instance and overall discussion quality declines.
So, to truly overcome instance protectionism, we need a new feed, in which an instance can find a good balance between showing content from other instances and its own.
I disagree that discussion quality declines by having mostly local participants. In fact it rather increases if you don't have a constant stream of low effort drive-by shit posts.
A bit of friction for people to see communities and subscribe to them is not necessarily bad as it makes it more likely that only people actively interested in the topics discussed participate.
Of course a balance needs to be found between this and convenient cross-instance discovery for people actually interested.
In my personal opinion, it works okay as it is now.
If I want to browse my small instance content, I use their local feed.
If I want to browse content from another small instance, I just subscribe to their communities.
Discovery is done through lemmyverse.net, !trendingcommunities@endlesstalk.org , talking to people, etc.
That's fine. I also think it works okay at the moment, but I'm a critical person and I think this could become a problem in the future, so I think about how it could be solved.
If I want to browse content from another small instance, I just subscribe to their communities.
I'm just not sure the average user does that. Especially casual ones.
Also I think the average user doesn't want to use third-party websites to discover new content, especially on the phone. These services just appear to me to be workarounds.
I would like to see a feed that consists of all the communities I didn‘t subscribe to (minus those I banned).
That way I‘d be able to see what I‘m currently missing.
One thing I would like is the easy option to browse another instance's local content without being in that instance.
For example, I like my instance (mander.xyz) for being very science focused, but I might like to browse all subs in programming.dev if I want to browse some dev-focused content.
My particular instance (sdf.org) is a pretty old-school nerdy place. So I like our local discussions. But I do like having the addition of what you propose too.