I don't know what everyone means when they use 'rule' in the title and at this point I'm too afraid to ask. Please enlighten me.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Uh no, that's a good thing.
It "can" be, especially for those of us who want and even explicitly ask for such, but I was pointing out how the lack of tools to do otherwise removes it as a "choice". Being able to switch between modes at will would maximize our freedom and capabilities, but simply having things be this way bc nobody has yet built the tools to do otherwise does not make it the best option, only the default one.
I'm struggling to understand what you think should be different here. You're complaining about the "All" feed, but you can also view only a "Local" feed from your home instance, or "Front Page" which only includes your subscriptions. At least this is how Connect has it set up. The two alternatives seem to be either you see nothing until you subscribe to a community, meaning you have to seek them out on your own, or your app/Lemmy creates a "Default" community list, favoring some communities over others and becoming more like reddit, both of which are terrible options.
Which is why I am talking about a new option, which does not yet exist but I am saying that I wish that it did.
Likewise, two previous options that went from not-existing to now-existing-and-are-extremely-helpful are the ability to block an entire instance rather than each community and each user on that instance separately, and the ability to set your language preferences and have most (or at least some?) even if not all communities dedicated entirely to a different language not show up.
Likewise, if you could specifically target - either in the positive sense of subscribing to or in the negative sense of blocking - communities that match certain pre-defined keywords that communities could choose to use to identify themselves, like "hockey" or more generally "sports", or to use another example "vegetarian cooking" or more generally "cooking", then later if tens or even hundreds of additional communities were to be spun up within that same category, you could remain subscribed to or block them ALL, if you so chose, without having to make that determination for each and every single one, individually, and then repeat that process every time a new one appears. This could be modified by making a stronger choice of an individual community override the weaker choice of a mere category - e.g. if I like hockey but hate a particular team (fuck those guys in particular) or whatever.
Since these types of communities (as "sports" or "cooking" or "which app used to connect to Lemmy" etc.) rarely correlate with instance, this has nothing to do with a Local feed. Rather it is like the other two aforementioned examples in that, depending on implementation, possibly being able to affect your Subscription (adding subs to categories of communities) and All (minus categories of things you would prefer to not see) feeds. The latter is where it is most helpful b/c if you were looking for new things to subscribe to, but you will NEVER in your life ever subscribe to e.g. sports or cooking, then it saves you a great deal of time & effort from having to make those determinations on a per-post or per-community basis. Especially when they can be quite popular to other people, and thus ranked highly when sorted by Top or also Hot b/c of the interactivity with them, but when your preferences diverge from the mainstream. It helps make the whole place much more "welcoming" then, when automation more or less mindlessly takes care of such things that otherwise would require individual curation effort to achieve.
"Default behavior" can be an entirely separate matter, or it could be related but I am saying that it does not have to be. The way I am thinking of it, this would all be optional, just like blocking or subscribing to a community is now. Eventually some app could even offer a wizard to guide users through selecting those keywords that they might want, but that is getting too far ahead of ourselves here.