Wish there was a way to filter out messages if the...

# android

[Matt Fenlon]

Wish there was a way to filter out messages if they've received a certain reaction; seems like most posts in here are not kotlin but kotlin colored. Amazing how many people don't know how to use a search engine in 2023.

(Feel free to Not Kotlin this post. 😝)

[Travis Griggs]

I've observed this type of behavior in any overly organized forum. Presented with many channels and the inability to discover the nuanced accepted content of each, people are left with making an arbitrary choice--accepted by some, rejected by others--as to where to ask.

The python mailing list is busy. And lacks some of the fluid real time behavior of slack/discord, but one thing I never see there is "not python"

[Matt Fenlon]

Good observation on the "where to post this?" challenge.

I've also noticed that some of these posts are copy-pasted into other (specifically Android) Slack workspaces verbatim, so I wonder whether the implied association between Android and Kotlin - with many juniors thinking that Kotlin's only purpose is for Android development - adds to the problem; Python is known more as a general purpose language, so doesn't have a strong association with a particular platform, whereas most people, certainly those early in their development career, will have only heard of Kotlin in an Android context, so the boundary is more blurry.

[kenkyee]

It's especially egregious in this channel on this slack unfortunately.

It's a slack workspace named "kotlinslack" so people should know it's for kotlin related problems on Android instead of a generic slack workspace.
There's another one mentioned in the channel description named "Android United" that is much more suited for generic Android questions and has channels for each category of Android question...

[Travis Griggs]

I'm learning Compose. There is a compose channel, and a compose-android channel. I'm not really clear when something I'm doing in Compose is something that is Android specific? or more general? The sad thing though is, that there is a large venn overlap between the two spaces, for whatever delineation is applied, so by posting any overlapped issue to one, I reduce the visiblity.

[kenkyee]

Compose-android is problems specific to Android...e.g. material theme, working with activities, etc.
Rest is generic compose.

[Colton Idle]

I sorta get it though. This community has become a defacto hangout for Android devs, and so asking android specific questions with so many android devs + googlers around just seems bound to happen.

If the channel was renamed kotlin-android that would probably have a better effect than the channel desc.

[Javier]

To be honest it is really hard to find Kotlin android only issues. Even more after compose release. I think this channel should allow ask more things than only Kotlin Android things or just delete it.

[Colton Idle]

yeah. in a lot of ways i wish there was just a google sponsored slack channel for android. 🤷