Ben Matthews

I’m more interested in distribution of users and local-focus of communities than country-based instances, nevertheless the map does illustrate that Lemmy has huge gaps - no country instance in all of Africa, hardly any in Asia… What can we do to make it a more global conversation ?

Two thoughts:

• I’m subscribed to 160 communities, most very small, but see interesting stuff due to the Scaled option - also deliberately avoid the big news communities. Evidently, it takes time to join 160 small cs, so to get started it could be handy to have an all/local except list, and remove the biggest news /memes unless people tick a box saying they like such. Or make an algorithm that prioritises stuff related to what I upvote (which is how other social sites seem to get people started - e.g. i just tried rednote and it quickly learned i like mountains and trains) - but i guess that’s hard to implement as each instance would need to work out ‘related to’.
• 2nd point - there are other user-interfaces - I’m using Alexandrite which has a better layout than lemmy default, but how to make this easier (instructions suggest docker, how many casual users will do that …)?

I might try Friendica, although coming from lemmy I’d be more inclined towards Mbin, to combine topic-focus and people-focus.
However as a developer I first check the code repos and see that both are based on php, which seems rather old, and i doubt this would scale efficiently if the network really took off. Recall that twitter was once based on ruby (like mastodon is) and shifted to scala for such reasons. So I feel, these are exploring well the potential user-experience, but the code may need a fresh structure (if somebody knows this tech issue better, please say). It’s good to discuss these things, to help consolidate potential efforts.

At the end I read: “I found my ideal social network … with the functionalities of Friendica, the UX/UI of Sharkey and the stability and reliability of Mastodon …” - so - please forgive me if I missed something, what does this combination, do we have to make it ?

I agree. For global discussions, are many Indians going to learn Chinese, Swahili, Hausa, Arabic, and vice-versa ? Meanwhile international-english is the new latin… Even within India, the south insists to keep english as an official language, to avoid being dominated by more populous hindi-speaking north.
Alternatively LLM-translation may facilitate multi-lingual discussion, but in this case the language of software development may still be influential during such transition.
By the way - this is an important topic for future of lemmy, which should expand more towards the south - where’s a good place to develop it (beyond such set of replies)?

I like some concepts and design of Mbin, something to learn from, but I’d believe more in its growth potential if not written mainly in php.

Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon’s ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?

I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

Nearly 200 upthumbs, more ?!
But the discussion explores broader and narrow variants, need to coalesce.

I’m using Alexandrite, find it good

Well, for example if I could reply to a mastodon post from my lemmy account - the poster would see that there (not here - but could show up on my profile page), and might follow it, so it could gain followers. To write such a reply, I’d need to somehow view the original post while logged into lemmy. My comments here do federate to mastodon, and if somebody searched for related words (at least from the instance from which I followed my #lemmy account) they should find this. Your “virtual community” seems like a mastodon list (I have a dozen such topic lists, that system could be better, but is improving), indeed it would be helpful to consider that alongside a lemmy community for similar topic.

the Lemmy devs tell you to use Kbin or Mastodon or anything else

So to reply to Nutomic’s closing remark on github:

I dont see why Lemmy should also implement that.

Because - if I could post to Mdon or reply to a Mdon post from my Lemmy account, some Mdon users (more numerous) might think - hey that’s interesting, I’ll follow that guy, then see my other posts to Lemmy, click and open up the whole thread (yes that works), and so eventually come to contribute to Lemmy too.

I don’t find that - using Mastodon (4.2) I can see threaded discussion in Lemmy - each comment as a post - but have to start somewhere.

I succeed to follow my own Lemmy account from my Mastodon account, it works (initially seems empty, but new posts/replies show up later). From there I could potentially boost or reply. If somebody clicks on my comment in Mastodon, they’ll find the whole Lemmy thread. This should help (more numerous) Mastodon users to discover Lemmy.

I discovered Lemmy via links from Mastodon, and so found i prefer these threaded communities. Nevertheless individual “status” posts have a purpose too, we need both topic-focused and people-focused structures, these should overlap and connect better.
As my Mastodon account follows my Lemmy account, my posts/replies get into that system, more might be discovered if I included hashtags here. However I can’t do the reverse - follow a Mastodon account, or reply to or boost a post, from Lemmy. Communities might grow more if we could enable such interaction.

From the review, seems like an insightful book from a courageous journalist. Pity people downvote based on simple reading of the title, we need such people, to understand what happened, and what can happen next.

So, can Mastodon 4.2 full-text search now see Lemmy posts and replies, even without hashtags? You can follow Lemmy communities and accounts from a Mdon account, that way the info is in the Mdon instance databases, but as the new search is “opt-in” only, do Lemmy communities or users have to set some flag to agree that our posts and replies are searchable ? This might help discoverability of Lemmy.

I’m here only a week or so, subscribed to about 100 communities that look interesting, but most have enough good posts yet very little discussion. Yet the top ‘world news’ and foss/fedi/prog topics get all the attention, it’s not balanced. I hope the new ‘scaled/best’ ranking algorithm will help, if I understand correctly this is ready but not yet released? People should make more effort to find, upvote, comment on smaller communities (note- to find communities I recommend search-lemmy.com - you find more than from own instance).

Regarding Mastodon - as there are many more users there, it could be a gateway to Lemmy (that’s how I got here). Now Mastodon 4.2 has better search, if you follow a lemmy community or account from mastodon, it may show up in such search. However Mastodon new search is opt-in for non-hashtag text, so I suppose Lemmy has to specify whether our posts / replies are searchable - anybody know how this works ?