Hey everyone
Theres been some discussion recently about the content allowed in this community so I wanted to make a quick poll to gauge what is wanted in terms of what people see here
The current description of the community is a bit ambiguous so this will determine whether everything is allowed here or if only more general programming topics are
You can just dm me with options ranked based on your preference (its ranked voting) to vote and ill share the results in a day of the overall vote tallies
1: Allow all posts relevant to the instance (main community)
This will let pretty much any post be able to be posted in here whether that be a help question, discussion, news, etc.
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
2: Allow any posts and direct people in the comments to more specific communities for their future posts (people catching community)
This will also let any post be able to be posted in here like the previous option but will guide people towards the more specific communities in the future to make them then post the content in those
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
3: Only allow topics that arent limited to one language, library, etc. (general topic community)
This will let posts such as: what is your favorite music to listen to while coding? or Here is some details about functional programming be able to be posted while something like a library for python will instead be posted in the python community
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
4: Dont allow questions of how to do X in X language but allow actual discussions or news about the language in addition to general topics (general & discussion community)
Like above but also allows conversations about specific languages in the community as long as its not a question on how to do X in the language
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
5: Only allow crossposts into the community with things like news being posted in the specific community first (crosspost community)
This will ONLY let crossposts be made. All other options also allow crossposts but this makes it so that the post will fill up the specific community while c/programming is a main post feed for people who want to see many different topics from the specific communities
Allowed
- anything as long as its crossposted
Disallowed
- anything not crossposted
- things not relevant to the instance
You can find some past discussion here https://programming.dev/post/388375 to see some points for the different options
Based on whats voted some other communities may be created or adapted to fit the new niche of people
(ill reply to your dm when your vote is counted, if I havent responded in awhile I may not have gotten it or im asleep)
I would start out allowing mostly everything programming related and only creating more specific communities once the posts for a specific topic start spamming this one.
All nice organization doesn’t help if the created communities are not used by anyone as the seem to small to be worth the bother. That’s at least how I think about it. Just leave it open for most posts until the need arises to split specific topics off.
The thing with having that as the rule is it can create some inconsistency in the eyes of someone posting. If theres communities for c and nim, and c posts start spamming the programming community so its split off. C posters will basically just be relegated to their own corner while they see occasional nim posts popping up in the main community
Theres also the factor of if the community is built up with specific topics other conversation points wont have a chance to take hold
We get the advantage in the instance of every community being basically on topic so if someone wants to see all of the topics (including the smaller ones) they can just browse the local posts. And that seems to be one of the most common sorts people are using here
It's a really hard thing to decide and I'm not sure what the right thing to do is.
I feel like if the main goal is to make this instance as good as possible for local users making many small specific communities would be best.
But form how I understand lemmy that would also make it more annoying for people from other instances to get all programming related topics from here if they don't want to leave their home instance. That would also include people that run their own private instances.
Although that my second point could be addressed if lemmy adds a "all" feed so that one could subscribe to all communities of an instance or untill that is available a automatic repost bot could be set up to collect all posts on an instance into one feed.
But I don't really know what the best way would be just writing down my thoughts on the subject. I'm sure whatever way you go lemmy users will find a way to enjoy this instance and community!