Non-general purpose posts

I think both types of community can have a value. Being general as in “all things can fit here” and in “only things that are general to programming”.

I didn't think of that.

I have no experience in community management so take my words with a huge grain of salt.

Same here

the hurdle of posting stuff, the and to enter these communities for people might get higher. As a newbie, (either to programming or just to talking on these platforms) you might be intimidated to post to a group of experts.

I think there should be a balance. It might not be ok to lmgtfy people in communities like /c/learn-programming, but it should be fine in others. Just to enforce basic etiquette like googling for a few minutes, or reading the community rules before posting.

So again I see benefits to both approaches. Maybe we just need both. Make a “computer science” community, advertise it on this community, and make it focussed on concepts, papers and the generic programming stuff. Filter the “patch notes” stuff out from there. And this community here could then be the catchall “landing-page” thing. There will be suff for everyone, but not all of it. There will be some general posts and some specifics. And hopefully we can find methods that people find their more specific communities if they have more specific stuff to share or ask.

Great points. /c/computer-science does sound really nice.

What about adding a guideline over here along the lines of:

    
if your post is specific to only one programming language or tool,
it should be something that's interesting,
otherwise check out our [community list] or [local community search engine],
and if the community exists, post over there to get better feedback`

(add a list of programming related communities in the sidebar)
(maybe also write it as faux code, and turn it into ascii art, 
it would help catch attention)

  

That would limit automated style patch notes to affected communities. So "node version x patch notes" is not fine, but it would be fine to post "node finally supports tail recursion optimization" and just link the patch notes.

People could redirect posts that should be in specific communities, so for example:

"How do i x in python?" -> /c/python, "Should i x in Js" -> /c/javascript, "What first language/editor?" -> goto /c/learn-programming, "how do i keep warm in the winter?" -> /c/intellij

That would help grow those communities, and over here those posts would be filtered out by both active and hot.

It would be fine to post like: "emacs does something really cool", "c# binary makes atoms look fat!", "does rust make lemmy go FASTA?!?!!"

And it would preserve the general mood with posts like: "fav programming music?", "programming and humility", "is chatgpt cheating?" as they're not specific to any language

Sorry, I got a bit rambly in my stream-of-conciousness post here. Hopefully you can get anything from it. I am not sure :)

right back at you, and thanks, this was fun

Regardless, I still feel like each instance really needs a !main equivalent, a default space for general submissions where posts can be cross posted to or from more specialized communities, providing exposure to a wider audience, while also letting link aggregators do what they do best by allowing users to rank what they think is relevant for the particular community, or general to the instance at large in this case.

Instead of naming this kind of community explicitly as !main, I like how !programming has been used for this instance instead, giving it a familiar title that reflects the instance that is it's namesake, while still encouraging this catch-all like community to remain in scope. For example, !meta would be unsuitable for this given it is already reserved for self reflection of the instance, much like Meta Stack Exchange.

One thing that could help improve this is better first-class support for cross-posting, integrations such as selectively merging discussion threads from communities on the same instance, to avoid fragmenting discussions, e.g. like how Hacker News can merge topics that reach mega-thread status. Posters could choose or be force to enable such cross posting for certain communities. E.g. if you want to post to the general !programming community, you first have to put forth a little effort to categorize your post by cross-posting from the most relevant community first. Although, this could be more akin to #tags, that may scale better with multiple matching categories.

Another feature that could help would be more advance moderation tools, such as post migration. Instead of closing or deleting offtopic posts, moderators could migrate posts with existing discussion threads to more appropriate communities on the same instance, e.g. just like how Discourse can re-categorize and manage user posts. I'm not sure how the logistics like the handoff between communities could work or how votes should be retained, but it's just a thought.

Wouldn’t !programming_languages@programming.dev already be a more appropriate community for content about programming concepts applied to languages?

Thanks, didn't know about that one

I don’t think your clickbait here is fair, as the original post you linked to doesn’t really have a similarly sensationalized title, nor anything about neckbeards.

It looked cool, so i made a joke and maybe more people clicked it. Also, when the author says you prolly shouldn't do this, it makes sense that the experts don't want you to know about it.

You may be envisioning the term programming a bit narrower than most, as programmers often deal with dependency management, documentation lifecycles, passing down tribal knowledge, juggling infrastructures, things that go way beyond just language concepts.

I’m here to read about programming concepts that can be applied to any/most languages

None of those concepts are language specific.

It should also be noted that there is no karma on Lemmy, as vote counts are attributed to post and comments, not individuals. AFAIK, there’s no public API to query another user’s total score of fake internet points.

That's really nice, didn't know that

That is a fair criticism, as generic or low quality questions should be discouraged from being blasted across the (main) !programming community. I don’t mind when someone puts forth a well researched issue with an extensive write up and is merely probing or polling the community at large for insight or opinions, but if it’s just a “How do I do X?” questions prompting “You should do Y!” answers, then those posts should be relegated to dedicated Q&A communities or appropriate stack exchange sites.

I agree completely.

What do you think about adding a guideline over here along the lines of:

    
if your post is specific to only one programming language or tool,
it should be something that's interesting,
otherwise check out our [community list] or [local community search engine],
and if the community exists, post over there to get better feedback

  

reasoning> It should also be noted that there is no karma on Lemmy, as vote counts are attributed to post and comments, not individuals. AFAIK, there’s no public API to query another user’s total score of fake internet points.

1. move topic collection into a new community

I think it would be hard to concretely categorise what should go into a new hypothetical !main(?) vs !programming given such a !main should still fall under the scope of the theme of the instance's name, programming. It could worsen the indecision for first time posters, or those trying to understand the applicable nuance between the two. Perhaps the community could keep with the classic montra "I know it when I see it" to keep posts on brand.

Also, IMO, trying to change the general default community from !programming to something else would be like trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted, or like trying to change horses in midstream, given !programming is already our largest community.