Why is the default setting for the startpage's feed "Local" and not "All"
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4374751
I think this has negative effects on the threadiverse because it tends to keep user's focus at lemmy.world and in general keeps users to stay in their bubbles
The ideal flow isn’t people making “lemmy” accounts like reddit accounts. Take an Arsenal fan. When he finds out the lemmy instance called arsenal.club, he doesn’t have to immediately know what lemmy is or what federation is. He can sign up, view and participate in his local feed, which will be full of Arsenal related stuff. And then he can stick with it or find the full capabilities of federation
If they default to “All”, random news is gonna fill all the default feeds which is weird for a general user
If you are e.g. on lemmy.world, random news will also fill your feed with "Local". Content-specific lemmy-instances are not the rule. The person you describe would sign up for an Arsenal-community and then yes, All as default would be confusing, but Local also. It should be Subscribed as default and All as next choice.
Don't people switch to using subscribed pretty soon anyway? All is full of junk for me.
junk
I'd say "irrelevant to my interests" 🤷♂️
If you sort All by TopDay it's not too bad.
Very well. Then subscribed should be default. But in the community tab, default should definitely be "All". I think here it would be even more important.
I don't understand why local feeds exist at all. Very few instances are topic-based. Most of the time a local feed makes no sense.
My little Lemmy is for art, or so am I trying to make it.
I think its nice to see which people are actually on your instance and what they are chatting about :D But its definitely an advanced feature, which makes it even more confusing to me why its the default value in the feed and the tab for finding new communities.
This was also complained about in this post: https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-3335429/ and probably mirrors experiences of other lemmy-users, especailly new-comers.
One paragraph reads: “Sure, there are categorization tools like Lemmy map that let you look up instances, but the Matrix-like grid will certainly not make things any easier for the average user. Even after logging into Lemmyworld, it took me a while to figure out that the local tab restricts all conversations to discussions on the Lemmyworld server. Switching the tab to all and catching up on discussions happening in the broader multiverse of Reddit alternatives is also possible. Still, there’s no visual identifier that guides you toward it.”
This was also my first impression of Lemmy and why I almost dropped it: I thought I could only interact with the communities on my server, which was very frustrating until I saw the filter for “all” and that I could join them just like that. Then it was fine.
