At least on my iPhone (no idea if iPads are different) you can reorder, but the icons will always be “dense” meaning no free spaces between them. They will always align in full rows beginning from top left. You can put stuff in folders, and you can change the order, but not have one icon in the third row, without the first and second row being fully populated with icons.

You would think that. But as a person having an iPhone… No it is not. At least the part of iPhones currently not having that option. App-Icons on your “desktop” will always align in dense rows from top left to bottom right, with no free spaces allowed.

It is a bit weird, and I don’t really see why, since you can change the order of icons in this dense row-grid. I am glad Apple warms up to the fact that people might actually want some kind of customization on their devices and not everything “the way Apple decrees it”.

But to be really honest… I did not even notice prior to this post, and I had all Android before switching to my current iPhone. So at least for me this is a really small non-issue, and maybe a nice-to-have feature.

I think both types of community can have a value. Being general as in “all things can fit here” and in “only things that are general to programming”. I have no experience in community management so take my words with a huge grain of salt.

The communities on Reddit were huge. That lead even in the smaller more specialized communities to have a big volume of posts. I am mainly interested in game-dev and Rust-Lang, and even there were so many posts that do not fit what I am interested in. But would splitting the communities make it better? Maybe I could then chose to ignore some of the posts, but also the hurdle of posting stuff, the and to enter these communities for people might get higher. As a newbie, (either to programming or just to talking on these platforms) you might be intimidated to post to a group of experts. And it is much easier to find. Just a “programming” community where all things have place can be a very good place to “collect” people and filter them into their nieche interests. Link to other communities, crosspost. Hopefully people will then start to post the more specific stuff in the more specific communites on their own.

I feel like Reddit made it harder over time to form a “meta-community” of multiple subreddits. Though I can’t right now exactly pinpoint why that is.

So again I see benefits to both approaches. Maybe we just need both. Make a “computer science” community, advertise it on this community, and make it focussed on concepts, papers and the generic programming stuff. Filter the “patch notes” stuff out from there. And this community here could then be the catchall “landing-page” thing. There will be suff for everyone, but not all of it. There will be some general posts and some specifics. And hopefully we can find methods that people find their more specific communities if they have more specific stuff to share or ask.

Sorry, I got a bit rambly in my stream-of-conciousness post here. Hopefully you can get anything from it. I am not sure :)