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I’ll lend my two copper pieces and say I disagree with the SEO factor. The over gamification of everything on the web these days, has ruined many searches. Just look at how much things suffered when the reddit blackout happened, and suddenly the likes of google started giving crap results.

We don’t need search engine first everything. The posts themselves can already be parsed, so there is no reason to overdo it just for the gamification for search engines.

YES.

I think these are all very valid issues. I know there’s bigger fish to fry, but I hope we get solutions to these soon.

Also, automatic linking of communities (like /r/subreddit) should be a thing, and the current use of the exclamation mark makes absolutely no sense

1 and 2 I don’t see an issue with. It’s like emails you can set whatever vanity name you want. Doesn’t seem like any difference of a case here. We’ve tolerated this even in the light of mass scam emails. Changing vanity names without creating new accounts/communities is a nice feature IMO.

3 the problem with your example is that just a community name isn’t enough. Are we talking “gaming” on lemmy.ml or lemmy.world? You’d need the full !Community@instance in the url. But i think this would be a good addition

4 sure? But there’s admin/mod teams that should maintain sane practices. If you run across servers that cause issues with this rather than using it “nicely” then block the community/instance. I’d rather this feature stayed personally.

5 this is actually my preferred method of usage. I hated clicking a tiny link to get to comments on reddit… or having to tap twice on the apps. Lemmy doesn’t have the limitation like reddit in that you can do link and text posts simultaneously… so you can’t contextually link to content OR the comments like reddit does anyway.

1. It’s arguably a better experience than just displaying !lemmy_help@lemmy.ml. That was easy on reddit as it would only be lemmy_help but the fediverse addresses can be really long. Ultimately a UI thing, that could easily become configurable in the future. Apps and alternative frontends will also likely do things differently. Lemmy is still figuring things out after all.

2. Same as 1. That’s also something that can be handled in the frontend, there could even be a warning if it detects that multiple users have the same name in a community or thread and fallback to the full address.

3. That one I’ve definitely wished was a thing since day one of setting up my instance. I wish it used some sort of GUID or at least scoped numeric IDs that’s consistent across all instances so that it’s easier to access content from a different instance. ID 63728474 could be ID 42 on my instance because it’s brand new. Makes it near impossible to effectively rewrite URLs transparently to always go through the home instance. Numeric IDs also suffer from some scalability problems on databases if you ever need to start sharding to scale horizontally. I like MongoDB’s IDs, they encode a timestamp, a machine ID and some other data so that they’re mostly incrementing (much friendlier for indexing than pure random) with very low risk of collisions. There might be a technical reason however as anyone in the fediverse could flood the network with collisions and make things complicated. But if the community’s instance is responsible for ID generation that’d help a lot.

4. That’s a good argument, it’s probably just not been fully thought out yet. A good middleground could be to only allow a small subset like italics and code but skip the bolds, underline and everything else that can be noisy. In programming communities sometimes there’s bits of code that kinda looks ugly in titles, like “How do I make my struct implement Pin + 'static in Rust”.

5. Definitely more of a UI thing, many apps already implements this differently. That could be a user setting, and alternative UIs could implement it completely differently.

The link one annoys me the most haha. But I do see the validity to your other concerns.