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.

I see where you’re coming from but to me anything related to programming goes.

If you don’t want that then point people to the right communities and delete unfitting posts. I guess that’s the only way to keep it clean. As a side effect, this may actually help other more specific communities in the long run.

Allow any posts and direct people in the comments to more specific communities for their future posts (people catching community)

I think it’s best to tend toward more permissive, so I vote for option 2.

One thing I would suggest is this that while “help me” posts might not be appropriate, “this is how I fixed it” posts can be cool. So if someone decides to write a post or link an article about “how I fixed my remote docker debugger”, I think that’s great. But not so much “please help me fix my remote docker debugger”.

Just my 2 cents.

A more restrictive approach seems like a massive mistake while the Lemmy community landscape is still in its infancy.

With that in mind, Option 2 seems to offer the best flexibility for this community moving forward and best cross-pollination potential for Lemmy as a whole.

I was a big fan of /r/programming’s rules. I’m here to read about and discuss programming with like-minded persons.

I’m not here to be tech support, and my music tastes are for music communities.

Think I’m most keen on #1 But please require a tag on Help posts?

I’ve already voted in a DM, so this is just general commentary.

I like a combination of welcoming, general discussion mixed with instructive and helpful discussion of specific topics.

To that end, I think that this specific community should welcome everyone and everything relevant to the instance, but direct people to more relevant communities as necessary. Where “as necessary” might evolve over time as this and other communities develop.

I think the second option captures that nicely. I think the first option captures the welcoming, but at the expense of possibly burying things in details that would be more effectively handled by dedicated communities.

Despite providing a ranking for the other options, I think they are all either weak compromises on what I’d like to see or outright unwelcoming. The only real reason for providing those rankings was to put the first option at the bottom :)

I’m not familiar yet with the Lemmy API, but isn’t there a possibility to move posts around?

For example someone posts “[HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly” in /c/Programming… A moderator could suggest the user to move their post to /c/Python instead

As I mentioned in a post that presumably sparked this vote - communities are theoretically a node-tree - (/c/Python being a child of /c/Programming)

so option #2 here would help people find the correct community for their next post, but that seems like a weird “sorting algorithm” - “this post is in the wrong spot, hopefully you’ll do better next time” - why not just move stuff around this time, instead of next time

My order of thoughts/preferences:

• I think people catching will transition well for us the best, especially once mods can migrate posts to better suited communities.
• General discussion would nicely reduce junior help questions, and improve the SNR for real discussions.
• Cross posting would really encourage growth of the long tale of smaller communities here, but Lemmy mods can’t (yet) manual/auto merge threads over instance cross-posts (technical missing feature?) so keeping with a conventional main community is a bit better for now in avoiding too many duplicate posts across the instance, or splintering of discussions.
• General topic only is a bit too restrictive, and could harm post traffic, while still making it difficult to moderate consistently.

I vote option 2

I know ranked voting is a good system, but the options are a bit confusing to me as they don’t seem mutually exclusive. Perhaps it is correct, but I have never seen a ranked vote like this. For example, I believe you could allow cross posting in addition to allowing topics that are not limited to one language.

My vote is 4 2 1 3 5. I DMed, just sharing my thoughts.

(I think the “or hyper specific towards it” part of option 4 needs to be removed because the rest of the description says it allows specific topics and that is the only thing separating it from option 3.)

I find 3 (don’t allow topics related to a single technology) to be foolish. How do you even begin to count? Take Rails, isn’t that two, Ruby and Rails? Or Spring being two? Even if there was a proper and reasonable way to count it would just be so odd.

Option 5 I rank the lowest because there doesn’t seem to be any cross posting functionality built in currently other than just sharing the URL. It just seems like an odd restriction.

One of the most off putting things on Reddit was always over zealous moderators. They’d get more concerned with the letter of the law than the spirit. It’s annoying putting effort into something only to ha e someone seemingly flippantly remove it. I understand the desire for less posts people don’t want to see but we’re still very small. I don’t think we should be so concerned with that yet. Better to have relaxed rules for now.

Just an anecdote, but on Reddit there were three communities for Java. r/java, r/learnjava, and r/javahelp. On top of that, r/java ONLY allows discussion of Java, not JVM languages or the JVM. It’s just exhausting. People just feel this need to organize things super rigidly I guess, but to contributors it just feels like people wanting to have dominion over their little sections of the internet.

I think option 4 is probably the best middle ground. It most closely reflects r/programming which is what I think most people want to be close to. I know I just complained about the idea of splitting communities too much but I think having !programming be for things directly related to programming and then a community akin to the random section of a forum for things like music people like is a pretty common sense split in my opinion. Call it like programming_chat or something.

My vote is 4 2 1 3 5. I DMed, just sharing my thoughts.

(I think the “or hyper specific towards it” part of option 4 needs to be removed because the rest of the description says it allows specific topics and that is the only thing separating it from option 3.)

I find 3 (don’t allow topics related to a single technology) to be foolish. How do you even begin to count? Take Rails, isn’t that two, Ruby and Rails? Or Spring being two? Even if there was a proper and reasonable way to count it would just be so odd.

Option 5 I rank the lowest because there doesn’t seem to be any cross posting functionality built in currently other than just sharing the URL. It just seems like an odd restriction.

One of the most off putting things on Reddit was always over zealous moderators. They’d get more concerned with the letter of the law than the spirit. It’s annoying putting effort into something only to ha e someone seemingly flippantly remove it. I understand the desire for less posts people don’t want to see but we’re still very small. I don’t think we should be so concerned with that yet. Better to have relaxed rules for now.

Just an anecdote, but on Reddit there were three communities for Java. r/java, r/learnjava, and r/javahelp. On top of that, r/java ONLY allows discussion of Java, not JVM languages or the JVM. It’s just exhausting. People just feel this need to organize things super rigidly I guess, but to contributors it just feels like people wanting to have dominion over their little sections of the internet.

I think option 4 is probably the best middle ground. It most closely reflects r/programming which is what I think most people want to be close to. I know I just complained about the idea of splitting communities too much but I think having !programming be for things directly related to programming and then a community akin to the random section of a forum for things like music people like is a pretty common sense split in my opinion. Call it like programming_chat or something.