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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Ask Lemmy
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It's a massive usability issue and a massive content discovery issue, imo.
For lemmy users who got lucky and had their first lemmy experience on a top 5 instance where a lot of popular off-instance communities are already subscribed to, then users would see a huge list of both local and foreign communities. For users who got unlucky and had their first lemmy experience on a small instance, their view of "all" looks like a ghost town.
Part of the problem is semantical. If they are going to call it "all" then it should really be all (all lemmy communities available on all federated instances). If it isn't going to actually show everything, then they should call it something else that indicates it's only local communities plus whatever local users are subscribed to.
I like the idea of calling it "Known Network" and "Local"
That could be better, but based on this thread I guess it could create other confusions down the line
What prevents users from switching to a top 10 instance using https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim or other migration tools?
Resource wise, it makes sense to only retrieve content the users of the instance are interested in. Think about all the nsfw communities popping on lemmynsfw and pornlemmy, as well as all the content in languages your users don't speak.
You are obviously speaking from the privilege of someone not only familiar with how lemmy works, and who understands the difference and pros/cons of joining a large vs small instance and can probably even name a bunch, but also someone who knows of obscure tools and github repos that host those tools. What prevents users from switching using that obscure tool you referenced is that most users never heard of it and didn't know it even existed. You are using the argument that new and casual users should have god-level knowledge and understanding...which is exactly the point I'm trying to argue against. Casual and new users don't know what they don't know. They don't know what other communities are out there and they don't know that when they view "all" that they aren't seeing them. Think about this from the perspective of someone who doesn't know what you know.
Regarding your argument about NSFW and foreign language search results....that already happens now when users of your instance have subscribed to those things. You can't argue that it would become a problem when it's already happening right now. If it really was the problem that you think it is, then the solution would be to mimic what every other search tool figured out three decades ago and put an option to exclude nsfw results when viewing/searching "all" communities. It's already possible for communities to flag themselves as NSFW, and it's already possible for communities to designate their community language setting, it would make sense that those options be presented to users for filtering. These filtering options are things we need now regardless of whether search results come from actual-all or subset-all. I'm just suggesting that "all" mean "actual all".
But, just for fun, let's steelman your claim that it would be technologically infeasible for "all" to be "all fediverse" as opposed to a subset of just what this server's users subscribe to (it's absolutely not technologically infeasible, but lets pretend it is) - even it that scenario, they should at least change up the UI for the communities page to make it clear that when the user selects "all" that they aren't really getting all - it should be made clear what the user is actually getting, which is "local, plus foreign content that is subscribed to locally". It simply is not truly "all", so presenting it as "all" is only leading to more confusion about what the users are seeing.
Then they can ask. Plenty of new joiners ask plenty of other questions, and the community has answered them. I agree there should probably be a consolidated wiki at a later point to address this kind of questions, but with the constant evolution of the platform, and the animation of the different communities, I guess everyone is just busy with something else.
I'm not going to address the rest of your comments as this is a decision made on the Lemmy platform level, actually I just had a look at the GitHub issues, and this issue is already tracked here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
When a new/casual user is looking at https://[instance]/communities, with the "ALL" button selected, why would it ever occur to them that they would need to ask others if that really is all the communities communities?
Do you want to fix this issue? Create a public page using GitHub, rentry.co or whatever, agregate the information we discussed in that thread, and sens that to instances admins so that they add it to their sidebars.
That would be a way to actually solve the issue instead of complaining about it without doing anything else.
The alternative is to propose a pull request on the Lemmy GitHub to change the name from All to Known network, but I know that the entry barrier to GitHub pull requests is usually higher.