TLDR: Poor discoverability impedes the threadiverse's growth by making life hard for new users. Here are some suggestions on how discoverability could be improved.
- Make fediverse-wide search more friendly by hiding complex front-ends and grouping search results by type
- Allow communities to be discovered more easily on unfederated instances via directory services
- Bring over at least some content (last X posts, last Y days, all pinned posts) when first federating communities
- Ideally bring over all content, or find a way for searches and sorts to interrogate the most complete set of community data (likely the data on the community's original instance)
I'm still learning about how the fediverse works, so if I've gotten something wrong in the following discussion (eg terminology, or even a fundamental understanding of federation works), please do correct me. There's a chance I'm making a total fool of myself with this post, but here goes anyway.
In my opinion fundamental to the popularity of reddit is the ability for anyone to create niche communities. That's what set reddit apart from predecessors like slashdot or digg, where there were only a small number of pre-determined categories, like tech, politics or gaming.
Critically, reddit it makes it very easy for new users to:
- Discover communities tailored to their - even very narrow - set of interests.
- Immediately see what people are talking about in their chosen community, ie to show it is active.
- See what people had been talking about, ie to surface high quality content
The fediverse is poor at all three of these discoverability features.
I have four suggestions on how these issues might be fixed which are summarised above. I'll post these in separate comments as the post would otherwise be too long.
(By the way, I'm generally going to use the term "community" to describe both lemmy communities and kbin magazines, simply because I think "community" is more descriptive. Similarly, "posts" will generally refer to a mix of threads, articles, comments, replies etc.)
Assuming my understanding of how the fediverse works (as I said, I'm still learning, having only heard the word fediverse for the first time a few weeks ago) isn't too far out of whack with reality, I'm guessing these solutions may all be various degrees of difficult to implement. And not necessarily implementable at the individual instance (kbin.social, startrek.website) level, or threadiverse software level (kbin, lemmy), but perhaps requiring thought and application at the ActivityPub protocol level.
But I believe that making threadiverse communities and content more easily discoverable by new users will be critical in growing the fediverse overall.
This is not just relevent for a new user that is looking for communities, but also for people who create the communities. I created a niche community for an artist I admire and I can’t figure out how to promote it or literally just make people aware it exists in case they would be interested. It’s at https://kbin.social/m/ethelcain for anyone that would like to check it out. I guess for now the only way to promote these magazines is by posting them in posts like this one.
@pure_honey As moderator of a niche and currently tiny community - https://kbin.social/m/Musicals - I admit to a level of vested self-interest in making this post. :-D
It’s great you did that because it’s a glaring issue on the fediverse in general. It’s hard enough having to find people/pages/communities and already, but the fedi adds another layer of complexity which is the domain name: multiple people can have the same user name but on multiple instances which makes finding the “real” person you are looking for even harder!