Comment on Starting guide needs update
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 week ago
It would also be good to add a link to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, or if some similar community exists on lemmy.world (but I don’t see / haven’t heard of such), so that new users have a place to check for things that are constantly evolving and changing as the Fediverse progresses.
AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah that would be a good idea maybe. Pretty dead community though.
discuss.online also features only the dead link in the “starting guide” btw.
Iwas going through instances and it is actually staggering. This is what i have collected so far:
Best practice (Link from main sidebar)
lemmy.ca (but also links to dead browse.feddit.de link) mander.xyz (but also links to dead browse.feddit.de link) aussie.zone (links to dead browse.feddit.de link only)
Tolerable practice (Link from “starting guide”)
lemm.ee (dead browse.feddit.de link but also lemmyverse) lemmy.world (dead browse.feddit.de link) sh.itjust.works (copy of world’s guide so same problem) discuss.online (dead browse.feddit.de link) jlai.lu (hides it really well on a link to an external website which only links to dead browse.feddit.de link)
Intolerable anti-fedi practice :) (no findable mention of community browsers)
lemmy.zip slrpnk.net lemmy.ml sopuli.xyz programming.dev midwest.social feddit.it feddit.org feddit.dk feddit.nu feddit.uk feddit.nl fedia.io lemmy.blahaj.zone lemmy.dbzer0.com
I find this really disappointing. How the hell are people on these instances, especially small ones even find niche communities on other instances? It’s not like lemmyverse gets discussed much anymore.
Camus@jlai.lu 1 week ago
What do you mean? This is the guide linked in the sidebar: jlai.lu/post/623268
Where did you see any mention to browse.feddit.de?
AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I was lamenting that instances don’t link to community browsers / crawlers.
The link you sent has a link to this post, jlai.lu/post/541698, which has links to the wo links in the Guides (en Anglais) section to external sites, world’s getting started guide and some other, both linking to the dead browse.feddit.de link. Really hard to find, got to be really dedicated i guess :) And now the link is even dead, haha.
AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Where does it link to a community browser (scraper)? I could not find it.
Camus@jlai.lu 1 week ago
My question was more about where you found the dead link to browse.feddit.de you mentioned in your comment
The link to lemmyverse is in this post: jlai.lu/post/541698
Blaze@feddit.org 1 week ago
To be fair, it’s acting more as a collection of useful posts than anything else. It makes sense that it’s not that active
AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This only finds communities that someone on that instance already subscribed to. Absolutely not feasble for small instances and niche topics.
What guides though, that’s what i mean. Or can you link me the feddit.org, slrpnk, sopuli etc guide?
Blaze@feddit.org 1 week ago
Ah, I see. There could be indeed some improvement on that side, but I guess admins just assume that their users know about Lemmyverse because they got pointed to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca when they joined like in this kind of comments lemmy.world/comment/11995882
@Emperor@feddit.uk, @poVoq@slrpnk.net what do you think? Do you think instances should add links to starting guides in their sidebars?
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 week ago
Thank you so much for doing all of this work, to help advance the Fediverse! You not only are being helpful to point out the problem, but even provided viable solutions too!:-) (and additional considerations as to why they should be applied, beyond the obvious “it doesn’t work”)
I also see that most guide-type things across the Fediverse date back to roughly one year ago, during/after the Rexodus… and as you say, have not been updated since. Even the “updated” Lemmy Explorer link that you provided as a solution seems to be aware only that Kbin magazines exist, but I could not find a way to list Mbin ones. (also, “magazines” iirc was the equivalent of a “community”, not an “instance”… but it’s been a minute and I could be wrong there - still it’s something to be checked)
You mentioned my instance for example (I am no admin, just a user, but this is what I can find out by reading the various old posts), Discuss.Online in particular might be waiting to spring over to Sublinks - which I am personally quite excited about, yet I see no activity (on the demo version anyway) after 4 months, so presume its development is held up in technical matters (I haven’t checked the github in a long time, but surely that’s true regardless, right?:-P). I presume, or else I hope that we would have heard more about the activity related to its development. Similarly with PieFed and Tesseract etc. (and I don’t want to leave out Mbin, though that has been live for months now rather than something “coming”, and again please ignore how that url calls them “kbin magazines” rather than “mbin instances” - it is what it is).
The version of Lemmy itself is only ~0.19.5, so perhaps we should infer that it is not in fact a beta, but more of an early-release alpha? Or whatever it is called, it has already what the developers cared most about putting into it, and everything else not so much - as would be expected of any open-source project hehe:-). The choice of Rust as a coding language may have something to do with it - it is quite robust, but also quite difficult to learn, from what I hear, thereby limiting contributions of actual code. Also the developers are reputedly difficult to talk to - e.g. you must agree with their particular political stance (which among so many other things, defends Russian aggression against Ukraine, iirc?), or you are banned from their instance without a method to appeal. (Though I am not all that close to this situation, so I could be wrong in some of these details.)
And regarding !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, indeed I had never heard of that community myself until Blaze mentioned it to me literally two days ago, though they seem very knowledgeable about every community across the entire Fediverse, so I imagine if there was a more-suitable one to aid new users, that they would have mentioned it instead? There are ofc some other relevant ones, such as this community, Ask Lemmy, !Fediverse@lemmy.world, etc. - but those all seem more for established users, and especially with the higher turn-over of posts, therefore not exactly well-suited to a brand-new user of the Fediverse seeking to find knowledge, even if it is old, about how to best get along here. Though if you - or anyone - is aware of such, then I (and surely Blaze as well) would love to hear about it!? :-P Otherwise, it seems preferable to use it rather than having to create a new one - and more importantly populate it with posts, get the word out, etc. Yes listing this community is an imperfect solution - but it is a viable one!:-D
So it is not merely a link or two that is outdated and flat-out nonfunctionally wrong… there are MAJOR structural issues with the Fediverse, both having occurred in the past and planned for the next several months (I… think? I hope!?) in the future. Though anyway that is no reason not to fix it, so again I wanted to say thank you for showing some love & care for this place that we all seem to enjoy talking to one another on!:-)