This is funny and cool! I like the tiled/grid view even more after giving the demo a look. Not sure why but the instance sidebar as shown in the screenshot isn’t displaying in the demo on my end (Firefox), but probably related to being a weekend whip-up.

Still with the spirit of this as you mention in another comment, would love to see more experimental and strange frontends. It’d be fun to see more of the different Lemmy instances/sites with unique looks to distinguish themselves.

Aah, that may explain it! I thought it might be best to check logged out for a better sense of how search worked, so was searching logged out.

I checked on a different up to date instance (lemm.ee) knowing that, and confirmed it was federated with the relevant community, but didn’t see those results.

Strangely enough I can’t replicate similar results searching lemmy.ml either, so not sure what’s going on. 🤔

Thanks!

Regarding community search, sorry for the lack of clarity. I dropped a clear example when revising, I was referring to searching for a community by the form “videos@\sopuli.xyz”, note the missing ! from the start.

Maybe that’s more of an edge case?

Ideally these communities would be prevented from appearing in the “Trending Communities” list or local/global feeds unless someone other than the owner was subscribed to them, but wouldn’t be private in the sense that no-one could see them. Just they wouldn’t get wide distribution.

This raises a distinct but interesting additional feature request that might complement “private” or exclusive communities, as well as others that might like to prepare a community before promoting it: a hidden or unlisted setting for communities.

That would enable what you mention here, preventing their appearance from trending, and perhaps also user profile/data areas (i.e. if one can indirectly view others’ subscriptions, this might offer a way to obfuscate/hide that from others besides admins).

I think this would likely be the simplest solution and is worth considering especially since similar concerns have been raised with Mastodon over their naming of messaging specific people (“private”/direct/mentioned only/etc.).

Exclusive may be another good term instead of private.

Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from on this. Personally I’m not a fan of Active as the default, yet I also don’t know what might be preferable to others. With that being the case, I thought it might help to highlight some ways to work with it in the meantime, especially given the outside perspective.

For those here, I think it’s probably good to advise them to consider trying different sort methods till they find one that suits their preferences if they find themselves annoyed by the defaults, which has been happening for awhile already anyway.

I should elaborate a little, while I think commenting is important under Active sort for helping surface posts, I also think it is being balanced out by the vote scores. For a post to be surfaced you’ll want it to be both valued (upvoted) and commented on, then if you’re hoping for it to remain visible for awhile, you’ll want to see fairly steady commenting (that’s part of why you can see posts from days ago lingering around under Active, I think).

I’ve not really noticed too many situations of flamebait style posts doing this, as I suspect they’re generally downvoted…Aside from the beating-a-dead-horse sort of posts that, despite receiving the usual, “Ugh this again” sort of comments, seem to otherwise be valued by some lurking voters.

Fwiw I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t really understand why/what for. Game Pass isn’t really comparable to Steam or a digital storefront anyway, which already makes the comparison kind of silly. That said, I recognize you were going off the other commenter’s framing in the argument there, so not faulting you for following along with it. I did just the same in my reply before giving it some more thought with this one.

Nevertheless, it is worse in terms of ownership, but that was never its selling point to begin with, so it’s silly to criticize it in that respect, much as it would be to criticize Netflix for not providing ownership of what it gives access to. Also regarding Steam DRM, xcjs covers that nicely in the other reply here.

No, this is mistaken. If a digital storefront sells their media in a DRM-free format, you receive the files in an unrestricted way, similar to if you bought a physical book, movie, or album.

Unrestricted is not to say given permission to copy and distribute as you’d like, but that’s the same as for physical media.

As a mild illustration of why this would be a nice change, I’m unfortunately going to slightly bother Boozilla with this reply after almost 2 weeks. Sorry Boozilla!

Er…Maybe I’m overlooking it, or maybe there’s a slight misunderstanding here? I only see the option to adjust the default feed type below theme options in my settings, but without further settings to limit the All feed to only display remote/federated communities.