You are not alone, and I'm starting to feel that treating Lemmy like a federation of web forums instead of Reddit replacement would fit the underlying model better.

Vaikka Lemmyssä vielä nykyään onkin hieman puutteita koko Redditin korvaajaksi laakista niin r/suomen vaihtoehdoksi tämä on ainakin itselleni jo ihan pätevä.

Isoin ongelmahan tällä hetkellä lienee yhteisöjen ja instanssien kirjo ja epätietoisuus sen suhteen mistä tiettyä subia vastaavaa sisältöä jatkossa helpoiten keskitetysti löytäisi. r/suomen suhteen sitä ei ole koska tämä nyt ilmeisesti olisi se paikka Suomi jorinoille. Joten kiinni vain minunkin puolestani.

Join and recommend smaller general instances like lemm.ee, vlemmy.net, and lemmy.one at random instead. Smaller servers have been upgraded for the surge of users too you know

That was basically my logic when I joined lemmy.world a few weeks ago. Oh well...

Shpongle, when the walls melt.

Sentimental in the sense that I have been a Reddit user for 16 years and this makes me feel really really old. And in internet years Reddit is even older, I would have excepted it to die already years ago and it seems exceptional that it has kept going for this long.

Back when Reddit was starting to get popular I was mildly annoyed and suspicious of it and all these other new fangled web2.0 things but slowly it replaced random forums, news groups, irc and other old school platforms for me. To me Reddit sits somewhere between those and the more modern and "social" web platforms and as such it feels like a relic from the early 2000s that probably has no place in the modern internet. Bit like me myself actually ("Hey, you should post that on Reddit!" is the usual ironic response that I get from my kids whenever I say something really funny or insightful...)

And like others here I'm worried about all the niche communities and losing the vast source of content that Reddit has accumulated. Sure, most of it is low effort shit as usual but especially with how bad Google has become Reddit is now my first choice when I need to get an overview of some new topic.

That said I have been planning to delete my Reddit account for a while now. After all these years it has got stale, the hive mind is predictable and it feels like I have seen all the same conversations and topics already too many times. I don't need to read any threads on more popular subs since I already know what the most upvoted opinions, memes and jokes are going to be. And it seems like every few years they piss off their userbase in some way, who then threaten to quit and find something better and surely this the end of Reddit, and then nothing happens.

It's old. I think it's time to let it go now.

Me too. But I'm probably never going to check most them just to see if they are even alive since it's just too much of an hassle.

Except that they aren't "opening the API". It's their core product and they are just adding more features to it, which is nice but has nothing do with it being open.

Sorry for being a bore (I withdrawed my downvote, had too much coffee, everybody else is stupid and wrong...) but could we not make everything that has the word API in it be about that thing.

That's actually cool and a bit like what I had in mind. But it doesn't seem to offer an actual hierarchical view of the lemmyverse.

It would be nice to have a forum style clear treeview of the forums (instances) and their subforums (communities) with activity indicators etc to make browsing and discovering content straight forward. Then if you subscribe to a community it would also show in it's own treeview that the user could arrange to their liking.

Personally that term makes me a bit uneasy. To me it sounds too grandiose and organized just for something that might just be some random people shitposting or chatting about their interests. And actually having tight knit communities can easily lead to all kinds of negative effects, group think, hierarchies and drama.

Of course some subreddits, forums, lemmy communities etc can be actual communities but just as a personal preference I don't like the idea of calling them that default.

Regarding little Bobby, is there any known guaranteed way to harden the current systems against prompt injections?

This is something that I'm personally more worried about than Skynet or mass unemployment now that everyone and their dog is rushing to integrate LLMs into to their systems (ok worried maybe a wrong word, but let's just say I have the popcorns ready for the moment the first mass breaches happen with something like the Windows Copilot).

Sometimes, though, the people you're trusting to be objective have been swayed by ads themselves! It's honestly impossible IMO to be completely unaffected by ads because of that.

And even if the reviews are objective ads might have an effect on what products get reviewed. Or what products stores are likely to stock etc.

So even if you try to be objective yourself and do your research you may never even be aware of some competing product or it just isn't available.

I think this is the obvious (and much needed) solution and will be something that the clients are going to implement at some point. Maybe with the option to merge similar posts, it could (occasionally) be fun to have the option to see all the comments from different communities with different viewpoints in one go.

It's something that would be useful even in something like Reddit where the sub fragmentation is much less of an issue.

There are probably better solutions but I guess simplest way would be to solve that at the client end?

Give users the option to merge community views from different instances (maybe too much hassle for the average user), have the client do it automatically for some specified communities, or have a mechanism by which the communities can hint the client to merge their content with specific "friend" communities.

From users POV the last option would be the easiest (but it should be possible to opt out of it or customize the behaviour). To prevent trolling and harassment the merging would require an authentication from all participating communities. That doesn't prevent multiple posts on the same subject but if majority of users see the same combined content the likelihood of double posts decreases. It would still spread the load between instances, and if they want the different instances could specialize on different aspects of the subject.

Just a thought. I don't know if it makes any sense from technical point, maybe it would be easy to implement without any changes on the underlying protocols or maybe it would require some ugly kludges and would just overcomplicate everything or is something not many people would even need or want.

I'm not sure if I'd call that reverse engineering any more than using a web browsers View Source feature.

But it's interesting how it works behind the scenes and that only way to get these models to interface with the external world is by using the natural language interface and hoping for the best.

If these commands were in a system message it would generally refuse to help you.

Doesn't it usually fairly easily give its system message to the user? I have had that happen purely by accident.

But it is a problem even with Reddit.

At least for me many topics that I follow have several related subs and I often end up going through all of them individually to get a good overview and see different takes on news etc. With Reddit having the Other discussions tab helps a lot, but I guess that would be technically more difficult to implement in Lemmy.

IMHO both would benefit from having a way to combine different feeds under user defined categories. How things actually work under the hood wouldn't need to be changed, it would just be an UI feature that effects how the communities are presented to the user.

This now begs the question for me as a user: Which one do I subscribe to if I want to stay informed? An article on one side could be submitted or gain traction when it does not on the other. But subbing to both could lead to a lot of duplicate articles being fed to me.

Theres nothing stopping the client from offering a different or entirely customizable view to the content.

For example the client could allow user to place those communities under a common News category in their client. Then the client would combine all identical links in the category according to some criteria (e.g same link posted in the same day would count as identical) and either merge the comments or let the user pick which communitys comments to see, or preferably both. So comments section could have a buttons for "Comments at [email protected]", "Combine comments" etc.

I think it should be possible to build a client that hides most of the details about different instances and such so it would function almost the same as traditional RSS readers.

I think keeping up to date with 40 web forums would actually be easier and less confusing than doing the same with 40 Lemmy instances.