It wasn’t always great, but it was something we could check into when we weren’t in our niche subs.
IMO, like it or hate it, to get people to migrate we need to do a better job of recreating that general feed first.
When something is culturally relevant, it should surface there for discussion in an obvious main thread that’s risen to the top where we all gather. Right now there is took much work and choice involved in the first experience. Redundant posts cannibalizing comments and ultimately not facilitating the big discussion that Reddit could be.
Many other priorities to be sure, but Devs should work to make their default app experiences dump new users into a default view of the best version of this feed. Communities should also share and sticky same guidance on how to set up that best user experience (maybe per app), it should be unavoidable information (to start at least).
I know growth isn’t the main focus here (or an actual focus at all maybe), and it shouldn’t be, but if this is to satisfy the urge to connect on a better scale that Reddit satisfied, it needs to be impossibly simple to “walk into the room” see everyone talking about the titanic submarine in this one dedicated corner, and comment blindly that you think they should be called “hoagies” and not “subs”.
What do you think?
Mastodon’s “Explore” section does a good job of aggregating the “Trending” [whatever that means without a real algorithm] posts from all the servers that federate your instance, so the kind of front page experience you’re describing is definitely within the realm of possibility. Someone would just have to build it.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that this is all in “minimum viable product” territory, rather than being the final form Lemmy/Kbin/etc. It’s really exciting to think about all the new and weird features that are possible, assuming people put in the time to develop them, and users provide support, either financial or other.