PieFed Meta

Oh no, please, not more spam. I don't need notifications, for anything.

I will look at communities when I have time to read and write replies, not when the buzzing rectangle in my pocket tells me to.

The only notifications I have on is for phone calls, even that not all the time.

Also, those notifications are what makes traditional "social" media addictive (among other things), we should not do that, for ethical reasons. We know that it has mental health effects and causes other issues.

The time of people matters. Having people get info unless they opt out is a dark pattern.

I wonder how many health effects this would cause for many people.

I don't like this idea as currently phrased, but if a question box popped up asking the user who just joined if they wanted a notification triggered upon each new post, that could be good?

Most communities that I have done this for I later un-do. Very few communities are both supremely interesting for me to want this yet also have low enough traffic to make it not overwhelming. (High ironically, this very community is one of them though:-).

Note that this would introduce confusion when users automatically get notifications for some communities but not for others.

In general it might be better to somehow highlight for new joiners of the platform the fact that a notification can be triggered on or off for most anything - posts, comments (including those from other people), communities, and users. So maybe like the icon wiggles once an hour for the first week or two of using the platform. Not that it's a priority to do such, but I mean something like this may be preferable than automatically signing someone up to a community without their explicit consent.

You mean communities set themselves up to be able to ping all subscribers whenever a post is made?

This is an interesting idea and yeah it would, in theory, help replace Discord better.

But in practice, I'm having a tough time thinking WHICH communities would be good like this. Definitely not a !games community. Maybe something niche like !stauf_mansion@lemmy.mods4ever.com lol but I'm not sure if the subscribers there would actually want that.