The time is ripe for philanthropists and academia to rise to the occasion and help shape a social network for the people, by the people.
Lemmy appears to be the closest thing to a publicly-operated reddit alternative. With tens of thousands of redditors looking for something better, I am somewhat surprised that more instances aren't rolling out from well-financed FOSS agencies, technologists and others.
It would be great to see some of the 3PA developers committing to this platform in response to Reddit's increasing enshittification.
There is an opportunity to capture the momentum that is underway, to begin taking back what we've lost to corporate interests these past twenty years, and to tear down the walled gardens.
Ah, if that's the case then that does make more sense. I admit I've been looking at this from the perspective of finding a public alternative to reddit, rather than a topical collection of forums.
With potentially millions of other users also looking for such a solution, I'm curious to see whether this movement is embraced.
Absolutely you can, but expecting a completely new user to even figure out what it means to do so is a big ask. Some users can't even figure out how to login using the app.
From the viewpoint of user adoption though, it just doesn't make sense to me to present new users with what is likely to be a very sparse "social network", unless they have registered at one of the top 3 instances (something being discouraged by at least one of these top 3).
It's amazing how something as simple as changing the color of a separator can make a world of difference in how an app feels. All of these changes look great!
As a longtime redditor but newcomer to Lemmy, it strikes me as odd that Jerboa shows only posts from the local instance in the home feed by default.
If we are to promote the use of less-burdened instances, and stress the connectedness of this federated platform, we should be displaying the collective content right from the start. Content scarcity is already a stumbling block for many converts, and purposely limiting the view even further doesn't make much sense to me.
If there is a more technical reason for this default view, then I can understand the rationale, but if not I'm curious to know why this is the case. What are your thoughts?
I've primarily used Arch for my workstations since around 2007, and sometimes Debian Sid. I recently switched all of my workstations to Fedora Silverblue however, and I've been very happy with this type of workflow; flatpaks for user apps, containers for my dev environments, and automated image-based core OS updates. I am convinced this is the future of Linux computing for most users.
The use of 'comm' and 'comms' as short form for communities makes the most sense to me. Lemmy's url path already uses /c/ as the designation as well.
Like 'sub' and 'subs', they are one syllable, and are easy to say and spell.