both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.

so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.

it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?

  • Servais (il/le)@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    2 hours ago

    !lotrmemes@midwest.social will work fine, but there are zero indicators for that in the GUI, you have to know the secret knowledge and trust the process, or flip back and forth between the Preview button and editing).

    If you see it a few times, are you not going to notice intuitively how it works? Also, even if you don’t use a ! link, usually people with comment with one

    But the codebase for Lemmy is in Rust so… not a whole lot of contributors to fix such things.

    Piefed is in Python, Mbin in PHP, Sublinks in Java. It’s more about the lack of contributors then the language themselves

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Not everyone is tech savvy, e.g. creative writers who know how to work the English language rather than coding ones, like maybe poets.

      img

      And no I don’t think the exclamation mark followed by community name syntax is intuitive in the slightest - for one thing it runs entirely counter to how username tagging works, and for another if you allow the UI to guide you then it will give the wrong answer, so these “pitfalls” act as barriers to learning, which imho are the polar opposite of “intuitive”, for this matter. Instead, I end up memorizing three rules (usernames are like so, community links similarly are… NOPE, that’s a trap!, and instead here’s how community links actually go…)

      img

      Excellent point about the non-Lemmys - those have different barriers I believe. e.g. if you visit the Sublinks demo, there are no posts from sooner than 5 months ago (plus ironically sorting by New shows zero posts, so it seems broken:-). I doubt people are wanting to contribute to a project that isn’t released yet, but then again I can’t ascribe motives to everyone, it just seems to make sense to me that having to learn Rust would be one type of barrier (although not even the major one, since many people may want to do thus for their careers - Rust is arguably the hottest new language right now?), and a project not being able to be used is another type of barrier.

      • Servais (il/le)@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        18 minutes ago

        if you allow the UI to guide you then it will give the wrong answer

        How so? Adding “!test” shows the dropdown menu, that seems quite intuitive :

        How would you make it more intuitive?

        For Sublinks, if people go on the Github (which you expect people wanting to contribute to do), they’ll see it still has active contributions: https://github.com/sublinks