I am trying it out just to understand it's nuances. I think the concept is solid, but I feel like the federated part could use a little more work so it's more possible to use whatever lemmy instance you prefer. Signing up on any particular instance is fine (Though I wish it had more options), but if I cannot get onto an instance that I prefer, it's tricky to curate my experience.

That being said, I think it is a fixable problem, and I have ideas to fix that based upon other websites I've used, but I have no idea where to submit them.

I've been using Ubuntu for a while now, and was planning for my new build (Within the next week or two) to try out PopOS (Which is still based off of Ubuntu).

If I was more familiar with Fedora, I might have tried out Nobara, (but it doesn't have the support that PopOS does yet).

And considering you use Nvidia, I've read that PopOS makes it easier to get drivers for that. If you're still new, either PopOS or base Ubuntu would work, but PopOS might get you set up faster. I wish I could give a more detailed answer.

Ah man, I'm sorry about your friend.

I have a friend with CF, there have been some good advancements in medications recently, so it's at least more treatable than it used to be. He has made it to his 30's so far, but I'm still worried for him.

Oh hey, thanks! These are great suggestions. I'm still getting used to lemmy in general. I'm not sure how to find beehaw. It seems like lemmy.ml is the only community showing up in the all section right now, which is a little odd.

I suppose my assumption is that the other instances have to be added somehow, but I do not know.

Yes! I figured it out, and honestly, this is a usability issue with Lemmy.

When you use the search feature as mentioned in another post on this topic, there is a delay before it adds communities to the search list. It does not say that it is still searching, even though it is.

So, from the search page, enter the community name like you mentioned: [email protected] Hit search, then be a little patient. Some results may return very fast, but community results are noticeably slower, and usually end up at the bottom of the list.

Here's an example:

Edit:

I also just noticed this aspect that might make searching for communities a lot easier and more specific. The URL. To access another community from your instance, the URL follows a very distinct pattern that I just discovered. For example, to 'find' and subcribe to that particular community on another instance from your instance, the URL would be:

https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]

I experimented with this a little bit and discovered that all Lemmy instances allow this pattern:

https://<lemmyInstanceDomain>/c/<communityName>@<targetInstanceDomain>

Knowing that will probably make finding communities a lot easier. I kind of wish looking up a particular instance like that was a little more straightfoward. Maybe I can make a feature request?

Edit2:

Okay, the URL thing does not work until the search function completes. But after that, it's available. Maybe that behavior can be changed in the future, though.

I received it, if you are testing for yourself.

I have a lot of PCs for different purposes, so this answer could probably be considered cheating. It really depends on what I am doing. I'll go in order of Highest usage to Least usage, and separate professional usage and personal usage.

Personal

• Future gaming PC: PopOS
  • Maybe breaking my own ordering rules a little bit, but this will see the most use when I'm done.
  • I am currently in the process of building this.
  • I am finally going to try to not use windows for gaming, it's possible it could be futile, but Valve's work on Wine/Proton has made amazing strides.
• Previous gaming PC: Dual boot Ubuntu 22.04/Windows 10
  • This is likely to become almost primarily an Ubuntu machine soon.
  • Not compatible with windows 11, the windows part is around only to preserve files at this point
    • Once I copy everything I want and need, I will see if I can move my filesystems around, this will probably be a huge pain.
• "Gaming" Laptop: Windows 10
  • This is merely my most powerful laptop, it would never outperform my future gaming PC, but it's certainly a lot more convenient.
  • I'm considering switching over to some flavor of linux at some point, but I'm not ready to do that yet. (Plus I have to see what works with this laptop)
  • It is compatible with Windows 11, but I'm not sure if I want to do that. (I may do it just to get the free license, if I need to)
• Media laptop: Windows 10
  • Originally a "gaming" laptop, it can't keep up nowadays.
  • I converted it into a streaming platform for my console games
  • Not compatible with windows 11, so when it goes out of support I will need to find an alternative.
    • This will be tricky, the last time I tried to install Ubuntu on it, I got kernel panics during the install process. I'm sure there's something I'm missing to make it work, but I don't have the time/patience/urgency right now.
• College Laptop: Ubuntu 22.04
  • I used this primarily for college when I was continuing my education.
    • It made connecting to the University's Linux servers a lot easier.
  • Has a development environment set up on it.
  • The least powerful "general purpose" computer I have
  • I'm not sure what to do with this computer now.
• "Pi Hole" Raspberry Pi: Raspbian
  • Used as my personal DNS server.
  • Kind of single purpose at the moment.
  • I'm not sure if I should use it for anything else?

Professional

I'm not going to list every computer here, so I'll just categorize them by purpose.

• Development: Windows 10
  • I'm a .NET Developer
  • Visual Studio Enterprise requires Windows 10+
• Server: Windows Server
  • For deploying web applications
• CI/CD : Various Linux OSes
  • Used for version control servers and CI/CD Pipelines

I personally find Operating Systems to be situational. I wouldn't say one is really better than the other. However, I've been moving away from Windows for personal use lately, as I've been getting more and more frustrated with the overall user experience. I know that custom shells for Windows exist, but I don't know how good of an idea it is to use them.

Oh boy! That both makes sense and doesn't make sense, haha. Now that I know that, finding things will be much easier, now. Thanks!

There are a few open source game projects I follow. I suppose the most famous one is the Freespace 2 source code project. Although it didn't start open source, the original devs open-sourced it later. It has great support, and a great modding launcher called Knossos. To play the game, even with the source code, you either need the original disks or a copy of the installer from GoG, but it's really cheap. Getting it working on Windows is pretty easy, but Linux is only slightly more complicated. (Fortunately, there's a new launcher that makes it way easier).

If you're interested, let me know.

I know the game has come a long way since it's initial release. I was sad when I learned how frustrating an experience it was when it first came out, but it was always a genre that interested me.

I will probably play this game in time for nobody to be talking about it anymore.

Thanks! I've been trying to create a longer post, it's rather long and it uses Markdown syntax, but when I hit "Create" it neither makes a request nor does an error appear in the debugger. Boggling.

Oh man, that would be nice to be an error message somewhere if that's true, haha.

According to Notepad++, the length is 12,450. I wonder how I can share this post, then. Thank you!

Found the limit discussion:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/849#issuecomment-1586866980

It is 10K currently. I should definitely create an issue about that that at least informs the user that this limit exist.

I think your assessment is fair, my only frame of reference has been reddit, after all. Having a good standard will make it easier to use, understand, and navigate. Having more general communities is a good start, and having more specific and niche communities can come later. Part of the reason for this post was more just to document the kinds of communities I've been a part of. It's quite possible as Lemmy gets improved, that a well-defined or complex naming standard is just not as necessary. Some sites have done clever things with email addresses, after all. It's not impossible that the same could happen with Lemmy in the future.

This instance seemed the most relevant to my interests by it's description, even if it's really new. I was honestly tempted to set up my own at first, but I decided I did not have enough time or personal infrastructure to do so as fast as I wanted to. I think I got really lucky in finding this instance, honestly.

Lemmy is still new to me, so I'm in the process of learning how it all fits together. Not to mention, I'm essentially scrambling at this point since I let myself get too reliant on Reddit, and boy is that biting me now, haha.

Only mildly related to this discussion:

When looking around, I noticed that beehaw mentions sub-communities in the sidebar of some of their communities, but I think that's not really an official thing, from what I can tell, just a regular link.

I have so many ideas, but I'm not sure where to put them. I suppose I could always open an issue an GitHub, but I feel like I want a discussion about my ideas before I create one. It's very possible I'm over-thinking it. Looking at the code base, this might just be the push I need to finally start doing more than reading about rust.

Is there a common place people go to obtain frameworks/libraries etc?

Yes!

The main package management solution for C#, Visual Basic, F#, (and other .NET compatible languages) is Nuget, of which the the largest and most popular site for Nuget packages is Nuget.org. It's usage is built into both .Net command line tools as well as the most commonly used IDEs for C#. (Visual Studio Community, Professional, and Enterprise; as well as JetBrain's Rider)

I also recently learned of another package manager solution as well, called Paket, but that may be fairly niche, and not as well known. So that's up to you, honestly.

I came across this on Wikipedia: https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet/blob/main/dotnet-developer-projects.md

That's not a bad list to include. But Nuget.org is most definitely the most important place to include. (It's possible that other public Nuget sites exist, but I've never needed to go elsewhere)

Sure, I do not mind for now. I don't have a lot of time to do so, but there's not many subscribers at the moment, so I can probably handle it for the foreseeable future. I'll try to let you know if that changes.

I'm not 100% on how I found this place, I think it was https://browse.feddit.de/ I chose this instance because it was small, involved tech and gaming, and so it seemed like a good fit for me. Just bad timing lead to me not being active this weekend, lol ( started vacation) But I think over time it has the possibility to be more active as I explore and post elsewhere. That being said, Lemmy has room to grow in how it federates and connects to communities. I've been writing down my ideas, and I hope when I post them to github they use them or something similar to it.

A simple post works? What the heck is wrong with my longer post? I suppose I will need to contact a developer. :(

Explanation

So, as I've been using Lemmy, I've been trying to make a list of features/requests. But my ideas are not... Complete. They're just simple ideas that may already have a feature request associated with it. So the purpose of this post is to create and share them, put my ideas on paper and see what kind of discussion can come from it. If there is already an issue on the GitHub covered by my idea, let me know! I can update this list to reference that here, so I know it's being worked on.

Anyways, in this post above, and added to this comment below are my ideas, feel free to give feedback or additional ideas. If any of these ideas get enough traction, I'll make a feature request issue on the Lemmy GitHub. (Of course, someone else could beat me to it, too.)

Usability improvements

Optional URL Federating

Currently, to federate, you have to search for an instance using the search in the upper right corner of the site. After it's searched, you can subscribe to the community from a URL templated like this:

https://<instanceDomainName>/c/<communityName>@<targetInstanceDomainName>

If you do not do the search first, (Read: You attempt to go to the community page before using the search function) the above URL would return 404. As a general improvement, I would say when attempting to connect to a community that has not been federated yet, it should at least attempt to federate before returning 404, saving a step.

Built in safety:

• Do not add, search, or federate the community unless this URL is requested by a local member that is signed into site/instance.
• Do not federate community until the local member actually subscribes to that community.

Separate load text for Federating

Related to above, when searching for a community that is not yet federated, there is a delay for a community that hasn't been connected/federated to the current instance. However, when it's done searching the local site, it is still attempting to search and federate to the external site/instance.

For this I recommend any of the following:

• In search results, have separate sections for local and external results.
• When it is still attempting to federate
  • It should show that it is in fact, still trying to search and/or federate
  • The message should should be distinct from a local search
    • Simple ideas:
      • Federating...
        • Advantages:
          • Simple
          • Drives home the concept
        • Disadvantages
          • Unintuitive (But then again, so is the entire concept)
      • Searching for external Community
        • Advantages:
          • More immediately clear
        • Disadvantages:
          • No side benefits like above

Notifications issue

If notifications are enabled on a site/instance, and a user decides to allow them, they get a notification for each tab of that site/instance that is open, instead of 1 notification total.

End of Original Post