Subscribe/follow individual users

[jm355]

I think being able to subscribe to or follow a user the same way you can subscribe to a community would be a huge improvement. Primarily this would let people follow other lemmy users, but following users from other services like mastodon would be cool too

[slrgt]

i would love this. the fediverse is so powerful because of compatibility with other services so this would help a ton

[Nutomic]

You can follow Lemmy users from platforms like Mastodon or Kbin. No need to reimplement that functionality in Lemmy.

[jm355]

@Nutomic i get what you're saying and since i don't have the time to implement this myself i'll abide by what you decide, but please reconsider.

I don't have an account on mastodon or kbin, i already have an account on lemmy and i don't like using twitter-like platforms. I don't want to have to check a bunch of different platforms to see the content i'm interested in, and i like using jerboa, which afaik kbin doesn't work with. If i switched to kbin for this i would stop using lemmy, because i don't want to have to jump around a bunch of different accounts/apps/services, i just want a single feed of content from all the sources i'm interested in following.

If kbin already implements making posts and communities and directly messaging other users, does that mean lemmy should not implement those things either? I would argue that having good core features is a good thing even if other platforms have them, and i think being able to follow individual users is a solid core feature like that

Also, the form of engagement is different on other platforms. If i could follow a lemmy user and see the posts they make in my feed, i could interact with them like any other lemmy post in my feed. That's not the case if i follow them from mastodon, and i don't know if that's the case for kbin

[slrgt]

@Nutomic please don’t close as completed. This is an extremely useful feature that will make Lemmy greater on its own and the fediverse greater as a whole.

saying there is no need to reimplement the feature on Lemmy is like saying we don’t need video posts or local only posting because it’s possible on mastodon

[erlend-sh]

This might also be used as a workaround for #3228 / #3906 by following specific bot-users which in turn are boosting all/most content of certain tags.

[tgxn]

I agree it would be nice to have a third feed filter option for "followed users" - I want to follow the content they post on Lemmy.

[jm355]

#3906 (comment) I don't understand what @informapirata is saying here. How would not being able to follow users keep the db contained? Is there a reason the load would be more than it would be if you followed a community?

[informapirata]

#3906 (comment) I don't understand what @informapirata is saying here. How would not being able to follow users keep the db contained? Is there a reason the load would be more than it would be if you followed a community?

following only communities means that you are not forced to carry within your instance database the contacts of an indiscriminate number of users, their images and videos, their threads and the contents of all the users they follow and reshare.
This is the reason why a mastodon instance with around twenty hyper-connected users takes up more disk space and more resources than a Lemmy instance with 500 users following around thirty communities each

[jm355]

Wouldn't the db only need to contain a list of communities followed and users followed, and let the client dynamically load user and community posts? (Partially trying to make a point, mainly just don't know what's going on behind the scenes). Also, isn't pleroma much lighter than mastodon? Maybe lemmy could do it the way pleroma does it?

[jm355]

Another option: every user could essentially have a unique auto-generated "community" of all their posts that other people could subscribe to but not post to. The only problem would be you might get duplicate posts if you follow person X and community Y, and person X posts to community Y, you'd get a duplicate in your feed. That seems like it should be solveable though, or just the cost of doing business following users

[informapirata]

Wouldn't the db only need to contain a list of communities followed and users followed, and let the client dynamically load user and community posts? (Partially trying to make a point, mainly just don't know what's going on behind the scenes). Also, isn't pleroma much lighter than mastodon? Maybe lemmy could do it the way pleroma does it?

There is no need to confuse two very distinct levels: on the one hand there is the software architecture that underlies the management, on the other there is the actual operation which mainly concerns the number of users present within the platform and how connected these users are to other instances of the Fediverse.
The lightness of a software like Pleroma is irrelevant when within it there are many users connected with many different instances of the fediverse.
I'll just give you some examples.
The Lemmy instance that I administer (feddit.it) has 1500 users of which almost 200 active users in the last month and takes up fewer resources and less disk space than the other mastodon user that I administer (poliversity.it) which has less than 150 users of which only about forty are active. The third instance that I administer, based on Friendica (poliverso.org), finally occupies more than double the disk space and has double the computing power with only 474 total users of which 111 are active in the last month (and is perpetually in trouble ).

[jm355]

hmm, what makes a user count as "active"? Is there a way to compare their server impact more directly, such as how often they post and what kind of content they post? I guess in my mind I'm imagining the 40 mastodon users could be doing more resource heavy things than the 200 lemmy users.

Also, if pleroma can do the same things as mastodon with less resources per equivalent user, surely that would imply that lemmy could do one thing mastodon does (follow users) with less resources per equivalent user as well? This is also based on my shaky guess that most lemmy users will primarily follow communities, and only follow a handful of users whose posts they really like

[informapirata]

hmm, what makes a user count as "active"? Is there a way to compare their server impact more directly, such as how often they post and what kind of content they post? I guess in my mind I'm imagining the 40 mastodon users could be doing more resource heavy things than the 200 lemmy users.

For the software on which ActivityPub projects are based, the active user is the one who logged in in the last month. it tends to be a user who statistically publishes more content and follows more users

Also, if pleroma can do the same things as mastodon with less resources per equivalent user, surely that would imply that lemmy could do one thing mastodon does (follow users) with less resources per equivalent user as well? This is also based on my shaky guess that most lemmy users will primarily follow communities, and only follow a handful of users whose posts they really like

The user who uses Lemmy is a user who only wants to follow communities and not users. Historically he is a user who comes from the experience of Reddit and that of forums.

The user who uses the Lemmy communities to follow a topic, comment on threads or open a new thread can also do so very well from Friendica or (a little less well, but still well) from Mastodon, Pleroma and some week also at Misskey.

Those who also want to follow users but like that type of interface can use Kbin, but for this very reason Kbin requires resources which, as users grow, grow disproportionately compared to Lemmy.

The question to ask is therefore whether it is worth distorting an excellent and fluid product like Lemmy, to satisfy a public that 90% of them already use Mastodon and who would never abandon it if not for a more powerful product, like Friendica, or for one that is more aesthetically appealing, like Misskey.

And the answer is clearly "no"