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.

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