I’m not sure this is actually necessary. I found that a single post of a moderately-interesting community to !newcommunities@lemmy.world wound up federating my stuff to all the main instances instantly.

I get the concept, and maybe depending on the details of the network it might be needed (it might be a good approach on Mastodon for example, which has a much harder chicken-and-egg problem in terms of getting your stuff federated). I’m not sure it’s doing any active harm or anything. But at the same time I do feel like importing this kind of “not enough people are seeing my stuff how can I make sure as many people as possible see my stuff” tools over from the SEO marketer’s toolkit might be a bad habit or pattern to get into.

1. Put up genuinely interesting stuff on the community, at least 1-2 times per day so it has a little flow of activity.
2. Once there are a screen’s full of posts or so, post the new community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca. People will see the thing and subscribe to it from everywhere (if they are interested) and it will get federated to most of the main servers.
3. As the activity continues, people may decide to post stuff of their own there, and other people will run across it either from the “local all” feed of your instance or from the “global all” feed somewhere else. They may subscribe to it, they may happen to see a cross-post from someplace they are subscribed to, but however it works out there will grow a steady flow of subscribers, if people are interested in it.

The sort of filtering aspect where not every new community will automatically get its posts thrown into every single person’s feed every day, is a feature not a bug. The steps above are enough to get it popular if people are into it, but also limiting enough that it won’t get publicized above its organic popularity level and start spamming everyone’s feed.

It’s called the social contract.

If you’re still in the teenager mindset, where you get to do whatever you want and it’s an atrocity if someone does anything to you, then of course you will feel upset about coming in, picking a fight with everyone in the thread, and them having a little chuckle and heaving you out the door and then getting back to what they were doing before you came in.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for someone who wants to talk in a community where they feel like they are not able to. What you did is not that.

It’s funny how all of y’all are rooting for this war to continue. You know it’s going to continue to be shit for Europe, right? I hope the war mongers get to actively participate since they love it so much.

Hard for anyone to see that any other way than hostile and as deliberately misunderstanding the situation.

Generally speaking, whenever you are telling somebody what they think, instead of reading what they think and then responding to it, you’re in the wrong. No one here wants the war to continue.

!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

It happens sometimes. More often on some communities and instances than others. It is for the most part recognized as wrong, when it happens. Sort of a “necessary” evil aspect of moderation that Lemmy inherited from Reddit, when they adopted Reddit’s moderation model which enables the creation of little fiefdoms under the exclusive control of one person or a handful of people.

Post up there if it happens to you, and you can get sympathy, feedback, and pointers to other communities that don’t do that sort of thing.

Edit: Oh lol. I didn’t look at the posts. You’re within your rights to say whatever point of view you want to say. If it is blatant propaganda and accompanied by personal abuse at people who disagree with you, you’re going to get moderated for it. If you really believe in these things, find some kind of “debate” community if you want, and I’m happy to spend at least a small amount of time addressing them with you.

why would you be searching for it? You already have it!

Because the search UI is how Lemmy chooses to expose the concept of resolving a network resource which you may or may not already have synced to your instance. That’s, arguably but not definitively to me, a design bug separate from the original design bug I was talking about, or whatever it is that’s causing it not to work right now.

You can see by opening up the developer tools and doing a search for world@lemmy.world. It’ll submit two requests: One to /api/v3/search, and one to /api/v3/resolve_object. For whatever reason, that second call is only returning the user @world@lemmy.world, but not the community, for me right now. Am I misremembering somehow? This is how I have always located communities, to subscribe to them, when I’m not sure whether they already exist on my server. Typing the full URL https://lemmy.world/c/world still works, and returns what you would expect in the response.

I didn’t choose to put that functionality in the “search” UI. The Lemmy developers did. I kind of get the idea behind it, I’m not 100% sure it’s a design flaw, but it was definitely surprising to me to find it there, originally.

So tell me: If I “already know the user or community I’m looking for,” I know what to type, but it might not exist on my server… how do I subscribe to it? What UI do I use? I know of one answer; if you know of a different answer than the one I’m aware of, it will be news to me.

It actually couldn’t find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that’s about

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Notice no community result.

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Also no community result. On my instance, I could scroll to the end of the list, and when the call to the resolve endpoint returns, the user but not the community gets added as a single entry to the very end. Like I say, no idea what that’s about, although it seems to be a bug distinct from the bug I’m describing,

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fc%2Fworld&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Also doesn’t work? That’s a little strange, honestly. Like I say, no idea. I’m just describing the somewhat different but also wrong behavior I see on my instance.

Just wanted to let you know: I was trying to resubscribe to !world@lemmy.world so I could say something. I went to the search box, typed “world@lemmy.world”, got a bunch of results including world@lemmy.world at the end, clicked on it, but it was the user @world@lemmy.world, not the community. I couldn’t find the community in the list.

It’s no kind of difficulty to work around the problem, of course. But it was a clear instance of me wanting the software to do something, the software messing up because it’s allowing multiple entities with the same identifier to exist, and me having to go back and try another way. It actually couldn’t find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that’s about. But yes, it’s a cause of minor malfunctions like this.

Correct. Gmail is doing it right, by anticipating how their server’s behavior might confuse people or lead to email going to the wrong mailbox, and making extra complexity to make sure the behavior makes sense. Lemmy is doing it wrong, in this instance.

I made an SMTP server that treats email addresses as case sensitive. When it gets mail for Philip@ponder.cat, it refuses to deliver it to philip@ponder.cat, and it allows users to create himbo@ponder.cat and Himbo@ponder.cat as two distinct addresses. Within my server, it’s not confusing at all. Outside of my server, there be dragons.

What should happen: The backend checks if you’re trying to create a community that has the same name as a user, or vice versa, and refuses to do it because that would be confusing, since a lot of ways of referring to an entity on Lemmy use the exact same format for the user and the community.

What does happen: Have fun with confusing!

I think the necessity for moderators to curate the experience for the members of the community is overrated.

I’ve seen very selected cases where that kind of thing is done to good effect. /r/AskHistorians is the most obvious example. I’ve seen a whole lot of cases where there are moderators who are abusing their ability to control the conversation, going well beyond just keeping everything on the rails, and deciding for themselves what people in the comments are and aren’t allowed to say.

Personally, I think merging the comments threads from multiple communities would be a clear benefit, in part specifically because it would eliminate that ability for moderators to decide how they want to shape the comments to look like.