Are there communities, free software/open source or otherwise, using Lemmy as their forum software?
Nowadays, many use Discourse, some are on Zulip, and I just don’t care about the Discord ones. Would Lenmy not fit the same purposes? It is federated and easier to participate in, like mailing lists - no need to sign up per forum. Matrix is too, but it doesn’t seem to be made for long-form writing.
I believe Discourse was designed based on experience with community dynamics, and Zulip is well-designed too. Would something with federated participation like Lemmy not work as well?
I’m not aware of any such communities that run their forum on Lemmy.
I think it could fit, although Lemmy’s design as a link aggregation site gives it some rough edges for the purpose we’re discussing. For example, the search functions are a bit awkward to use, there is no support for subtopics, and file upload support is (from what I’ve seen) very limited.
On the other hand, Lemmy’s use of Markdown makes it more comfortable for text formatting than BBCode, which is the HTML-like markup used on many forums.
In what way is the search function in Lemmy awkward to use, is there anything specific that can be fixed? You are right about subtopics, and also Lemmy normally doesnt show discussions organized by topic on the frontpage. That can be changed though with different frontends like lemmyBB.
Generally, I find that it requires too many clicks.
To search for things I’m usually interested in, I have to click a link to reach the search page, wait for the page to load, click a drop-down box, select and click a target type from the list (e.g. “Posts”), click a scope (usually “Subscribed”), click another drop-down box, select and and click a date range from the list, and then enter my search. That’s a lot of steps.
(I could enter my search before selecting all those other things, of course, but it wouldn’t reduce the number of steps, and it would put extra load on the instance host by triggering multiple extra searches before the one that matters to me.)
Also, in certain cases like searching for a community by ID, there’s a weird glitch where the search yields no results at first, but clicking the Search button again gets the expected results.
Yes, I think the user friction could be improved in several ways.
I haven’t made a list of potential improvements, but just off the top of my head, it would be convenient to have a simple search box in each community’s sidebar. Reddit had this back when I was using it, and it made checking for duplicates before submitting an article much more convenient than it is here.
Thanks this is very useful feedback. Especially the search box in community sidebar would be very useful and easy to add. Formatting for community ids should also be easy to improve. A bit later when I have time I will implement these things, and then make a post in the Help Design Lemmy Series regarding search.
By the way basic reading is working for me in Tor browser with JS disabled. Though buttons like switching Local/All, sorting and of course forms like register, login and search are not supported. We could use contributors to help fix these things.
Thank you!
I’ll second the community sidebar search. Almost all of my searches are searching for something from a specific community. Old habits die hard and I always end up navigating to the community, then going to search and finding myself having to search for the community again first.