Being subscribed to similar communities on multiple instances and seeing duplicates
There were also 2 more below that.
And this must be a bot, endless posts by this user, every time the same content on multiple communities.
There were also 2 more below that.
And this must be a bot, endless posts by this user, every time the same content on multiple communities.
Here's my idea:
It's a middle ground between completely hiding the duplicates, and letting them as is. Once you click that plus button, it shows the duplicates as full posts, otherwise it leaves them as just one-liners.
There is discussion on going at !news@lemmy.world currently about new rules. Users posting the same story from the same source will be blocked by an automod. I asked about users posting the same story from different sources, and apparently that's absolutely fine. So expect this problem to get a lot worse before steps have to be taken to make it better :/
The issue is that this sort of rule only works against duplicates inside a community; it does nothing against duplicates across communities, that users may or may not be subscribed to. As such I think that the solution should be on the interface level.
On another, related matter: you replied twice. I think that the server itself should prevent it, as 99% of the time it's by accident.
Can you put this suggestion on their Github issues tracker? It's brilliant.
I like this one. It conveys all of the pertinent cross posting info in a succinct manner.
There is discussion on going at !news@lemmy.world currently about new rules. Users posting the same story from the same source will be blocked by an automod. I asked about users posting the same story from different sources, and apparently that's absolutely fine. So expect this problem to get a lot worse before steps have to be taken to make it better :/
Would love to see something like this happen, good idea!!
This also happened on reddit
It did, but it wasn't as bad as this. My hope is that as Lemmy matures, this will happen less.
It got lost on the noise of reddit. There’s no way lemmy has more bots, let alone a higher ratio to users.
And it’s entirely up to your instance, the instance I am in has strict bot rules that other instances bots must follow.
wtf do the bots have to do with this? the issue is that multiple communities are all talking about the same article in many different places when they should be all talking about it in 1.
Absolutely not, the benefit of each community having its own vibe is exactly that.
Think of it it like this, one community is for Germans and one is for the French. They can talk about the same thing, but they will Absolutely go about it differently, and that’s fine. Pick which one you want to help/join, or hit up both.
Were not talking about language barriers, were talking about people building arbitrary walls where none are needed. There is 0 reson that there are over a dozen "technology" communities. If there was simply 1 community to focus on these topics the whole place would function much more smoothly. The core problems with Lemmy is that all of the communities are fragmented and spread out, by force of the admins too. This means small communities will never get populated unless a massive monolithic instance comes about to dwarf the rest. Right now, the largest video game communities on the internet don't get even a post a day. The only things that get traction here are politics, tech, and memes, because they are the most universal topics that can be minimally sustained on any online platform. Until the users and admins of Lemmy realize they need to agnosticize content, communities, and users from instances, this place will crumble under its fundamental framework. We need to be like email, and let the users build their spaces, not the few who decide to host the servers.
Who said anything about language barriers? It’s dialects and interests, they just do things differently, and if they are in the same place (like Reddit) you get circle jerks and other BS for no reason. Just like people don’t “shoot the shit” with work colleagues like gaming buddies, things are just different and that’s not always a bad thing. If I want to have a gaming type discussion I would join the gaming technology community, if I wanted an in-depth conversation, I may have to join educated technology.
Lemmy removes this, if you want this to be a Reddit clone, you came to the wrong place, you clearly don’t understand the intent of this place.
Again, no issue with lemmy, you came in here wanting and expecting something else. If that’s the case, this place isn’t for you and move on instead of trying to make it something it has no intention of being (Reddit)
you did.
Please point out where for the rest of us?
I was talking about countries, A they have far more differences than just “language barriers”, which I never specified or even implied, B it’s a euphemism that I’ve since explained a different way, which you’re ignoring.
If your intent here is to just troll, move along that can stay with Reddit to.
your whole example is centered around 2 groups inability to communicate with each other. its the worst possible example of people who are fully capable of communicating simply electing not to because it makes them feel better. witch isn't what's happening here.
….? What…?
What inability to communicate? And please again, point out where I said language barriers so I can help settle this confusion, if your intention is to have a discussion and not troll, please point it out.
You seem to be arguing a point I’ve never made, and are also arguing a different point than your original. Can you stick to one point and answer my questions as well? You keep changing subjects and points isn’t helping your case here….
The other guy, schmidt-something is pointing out that people will use their instances to have like-minded community whether that's interests, language or specialism, while you appear to be advocating for the reddit type congregation of people and for some reason also arguing against the other guy's description of reality, of how things are. I don't see why you are offended at him...
And I see you have your own anxiety and disagreement about the nature of Lemmy's federated system. That's no reason to shoehorn it into every discussion.
I think you are pessimistic about Lemmy's potential for small communities.
But have you considered that we're not indexed on Google yet? And we largely don't have a pervasive culture of promoting niche communities yet like they did on the large subreddits. So this is two other ways small communities aren't being found in the first place.
the entirety of lemmy is not big enough to warrant splitting "technology" into 5+ different groups. this isn't different groups of people all talking about something from different perspectives, its the same people separated by federation while simultaneously filling everyone's feeds with the same exact content.
1 i'm not really offended, i don't care about anonymous morons on the internet. 2, have you even read these comments?
lemmy is indexed by google. it shows up on the first page of the search for "lemmy"
Buddy wants this to be Reddit 2.0 where the same tropes get traction instead of actual discussions.
The hive mind and centralized speak of Reddit is horrendous, at least lemmy allows minor discussions to happen without it getting muddled. That can’t happen in large communities, and buddy just can’t seem to comprehend that some people want something different.
Hello you two. Just wanted to say you both make very compelling arguments. I get the feeling that there's a possibility that you're misunderstanding each other
Not misunderstanding at all, buddy wants a Reddit clone, while this has no intention of being so.
Buddy is just in the wrong place and wants this to be like something else.
The only way it happens less is if lemmy actually does something to merge communities or treat cross posts as a single post.
unless communities and users become agnostic to instances, this problem will never be solvable. also defederation makes this virtually impossible.
It shouldn't be that difficult to give mods or administration the ability to name communities that "super federate" and appear as local to all instances. That or make Instances more agnostic.
a simple flaw in this design is that users on lemmy.world and users on beehaw.org are not federated, so how do we resolve that issue for a community that is on .ml, .world, beehaw, and nsfw, beehaw would have to support content from world, who they are currently defederated with, or their users would just not see content from world users. the whole premise of defederation is ironically antithetical to the premise of federation. by making a larger group of distributed users, the system could work great. but the admins are taking their personal issues to each other causing fractures that make adoption for newer users and more laymen basically impossible. that whole "it doesn't matter what instance you use" is complete BS at this point since half of the top 5 instances are defederated frome at least 1 other.
That’s a Whole lot of words to say I want a Reddit clone.
Go fix Reddit instead of making this something it’s not.
It won't.
There is a cross post feature, and the resuting post appears to be aware it was cross posted - it would be nice if Lemmy would consolidate those to one post that appears in multiple communities, or at least show you only one of them.
Lemmy needs cross communities that exist across instances otherwise it's going to get more and more fragmented
Why do people insist that there needs to be (for example) /c/politics on every instance? Really, there are only 3 or 4 with any substantial traffic, and there are good reasons to pick one over the others, and they are the same good reasons for them to be separate.
This is a fundamental issue with the way that lemmy is organized that was identified early. Its a design consideration thats pretty much baked into the cake that each lemmy instance effectively tries to be an entire reddit.
Its a bit of an issue, because this will necessarily dilute the kind of network effect that is what allows social media to be as engaging as it can be. Interesting articles don't get as much momentum. The interaction is more diffuse. Conversations are more spread out and fragmented.
Its beyond the scope of the current design, and I really do commend the developers for what they've built (lemmy as is a great experience); however, a more 'instance' based approach may have made more sense based on how we've seen things scale. Instead of every lemmy instance trying to be 'all of reddit' each lemmy instance would focus on a set of niches (for example, a fashion focused instance would have c/fashion, c/mens_fashion_advice, c/streetware,... whatever); then they would federate to propage these niche across the fediverse.
The Star Trek lemmy instance is an example of this. Its a home for all things star trek. I also tried to start something like that focused around WallStreetBets, but afaik, WSB had almost no exodus.
More importantly, the critical mass to get enough users for the content to be interesting didn't happen. There were too many competing /c's across the lemmyverse. So articles get posted, but none get more than 1-3 upvotes because the userbase that would get it to say 5-15 upvotes simply isn't there.
I really do love lemmy for what it is, but this design consideration is absolutely what is preventing Lemmy from being a true Reddit killer. The structure of federation sets lemmy(s) up in a way that there is an inherent blocking factor to super-connectivity.
However, I can imagine a couple solutions to this that dont necessarily require a full burn down and rethinking of lemmy.
One would be to allow for the merging of communities. Users set up C's, but if there was some way to do a kind of merge (as like on github), where the two RSS feeds could be merged (as in github). Likewise, it would make sense if there were a way to 'split' or fork communties, as in, say you've got c/fashion, and some one wants to fork off and have it become c/mens_fashion. This would allow communities to consolidate around critical mass (there are enough posts, comments, etc to represent meaningful engagement), and then also to diffuse that issue latter when it makes sense to maybe split off political memes from say, political discussion.
A second solution would be to allow communities to be 'transferred' across the federation. This makes sense in that your 'local' community should be comprised of the things you care about the most (fashion, mens fashion, streetware, etc..). This feature would allow niche communities to consolidate into single instances, which will also serve to drive engagement (a user of mens fashion is far more likely to post into streetware and vice versus).
A third option would be to build a super structure to lemmy that allows for the consolidation of multiple lemmy RSS feeds into one. Effectively, user would be able to identify various lemmy communities into 'supper communities' that consolidate them under a single heading (a tool to grab up all the 'mens fashion advice /c's across the fediverse) and deliver it in a single RSS feed.
Of the three of these the third option makes the most sense to me. It requires the least rework of the underlying data structures, and seems like a bolt on solution. However, it also might be the least effective of the three. I've no intuition about what that would do the structure of the network or if it would aid in overcoming critical thresholds of engagement.
Before I knew about Lemmy I was in the process of designing my own replacement platform. While I think that decentralization is good, I felt like it should be done at the community level. So everyone is federated to a few user account instances, then each community is a self-hosted instance.
Obviously we’re too far past that point to do it with Lemmy, but it does feel like federation can be an obstacle as much as it can be a benefit
when admins leavy defederation like a nuclear weapon, you know its a problem.
Having instances focused on one specific thing is the best solution, but it requires a couple other problems to be solved first.
The biggest one is discovery. Lets take your example of a fashion instance, hypothetically we'll call it fashion.world. Lets assume I'm a user interested in fashion setting here on lemmy.world, and I want to subscribe to a fashion community. Currently the lowest resistance method is to hop over to the local community list and scroll through looking for any fashion related communities. If I'm a little more savvy maybe I hop over to the search option and take a crack at some plausible sounding community names starting with just fashion. That might work, but it relies on lemmy.world already being federated with fashion.world, which in turn relies on another user having already found and subscribed to one of their communities. On a very large instance like this one that's probably a decent chance of having occurred, but on small or obscure instances it's very unlikely. So we have a massive discoverability problem now. There needs to be some kind of centralized registry where you can type a term and see all the communities across all the instances that might be related to that term.
Another related problem is that instances, communities, and users, are closely bound to each other. I think it was a mistake to put everything together. It simplified things in the early days, it makes it possible to treat a lemmy instance as a mini-reddit, but it causes problems in the long run. Instead you should have a service for users to authenticate with and federate user messages and such, and an instance for communities to be hosted out of and federated. This would also simplify some aspects of moderation as user instances could setup a consistent set of rules they expect their users to follow. If you get caught not following those rules you get banned from the instance. Communities then could have their own rules they setup and via de-federation with different user registries you'd have a quick way of deciding the kinds of users you want in your community. Seeing a lot of hate speech coming out of the user registry run like a 4chan board? Sorry fellas, ban hammer time, that's why you can't have nice things. Not to mention breaking users and communities apart lets things scale in a more natural fashion, where the load the community server is under is directly proportional to the interest in those communities rather than if that instance happened to be the most well known one when someone went to register their account.
Spot on about the discovery issue. My concern with your outline though is its a total rework. My thinking is that the die is cast with regards to this experiment. So in that sense we kind of have to work with what we have.
Just bc there are 100 things called /c/whatever doesn't mean people will fragment. On Reddit, the only difference is the names would have to be different in a new way. You can quickly sort by active, find the active community, and use it. The others will die, and the network effect will live.
No it wont.
I just did a massive cleanup now that I've been on Lemmy long enough to know which communities on which instances are active. I've had to do this on Reddit as well.
This icon
makes a cross-post, it shoud be used, because it combines them in the feed if both are in the same view (often in New), but it probably should be automated, at least if the link and the title are the same, so it also works if someone doesn't use the button to cross post.
Example:
This way you still are only one click away from each communities comments.
Yes when I see this I downvote all duplicates.
Lemmy should, however, find all federated duplicates and offer you to cross post an existing one when such a case arises. It would fix many of these cases.
Not all clients support this (yet). I only found out about this recently and have to go to the browser to use the crosspost feature.
Yeah, I don't have that option on jerboa and loading lemmy in a browser on mobile is a terrible experience.
I'd say it's not too bad compared to Reddit and other mobile websites these days
There's no ads, no annoying accept cookies stuff, no log in to continue,... what more could you possibly want?
But did you know about the nearly 50% reduction in Threads users???
If it's posted three times, does that mean Threads users are down 87.5% or up 50%?
It's the same motherfucker just karma farming
Farming what? There is no karma on lemmy
There is karma on lemmy, available through api
okay but literally no one cares about that
No one except the aforementioned motherfucker
so why do you care about them caring
Why do you care about them caring about them caring HUH?!
good point, why do you care though?
I also choose this guys mother
Maybe he just hates Zuckerberg that much haha
Just block the user?
Yep, it's one thing if someone is posting a lot to a sub they want to grow. But if someone is posting the same article to like 10 different subs in 2 minutes...
Just block em
I've blocked like 5+ different instances of World News and 5+ of Politics, it's all just bullshit.
If you're on Android and want filters, I'm looking for beta testers for my app. I've got keyword filters that can hide or collapse posts that contain a word or phrase.. well really I have a system that is very easy to add filters to and I'm looking for feedback
If you have an idea that would work better for you, let me know
I'm finishing up testing today and spending tomorrow hopefully getting a build uploaded, let me know or check out !flemmy@lemmy.world if you're interested
Iphone build is in the works, keep an eye out for Luna for Lemmy
I feel like the best way to handle the situation with similar/same communities on different instances is to allow communities to automatically federated with other communities. That way subscribing to one community will show you its posts and all the posts to its linked communities.
It would be especially helpful for these general purpose communities like Technology or News since I would imagine most communities are going to have one.
If that happens then we wouldn't need to hunt down and follow every single instance of the same community. Let the mods handle it on their end to save the rest of us the effort.
not a necessarily a bot, but also there need to be a feature where duplicate posts need to be hidden. inoreader (rss reader) has this is a premium feature. lemmy apps need to draw inspiration from the rss readers, since content is similar. in fact i used to browse inoreader before using a lemmy client app.
What about the comments though? I don't think hiding duplicates or merging comments will be easy
I think it does that if they're cross posted, at least someone else said that, but maybe they need to make that easier on more of the mobile clients.
I think bots are too agressive posting everywhere. example linkbot, it has posted over 20000 posts and its only one month old account.
I think "World News" and "Technology" are not quite similar communities. It's up to the mods of each community to decide whether the content posted is appropriate to that community. One could argue, that an article about Threads is not exactly "World News" though. Also I think that the different variants of e.g. Technology will have a "flavor" of the instance that it's hosted on. You then get the option to subscribe only to the flavors you like, or if you subscribe to all, then there's bound to be some duplicates. Maybe some future feature could combine them - it would need to be clear which comment threads are from which instance though.
personally I'm more annoyed that there are several "Technology" communities and several "World News" communities, rather than World News and Technology sharing a similar topic.
Just pick one. They mostly have the same content anyway. I know ideally they should be different (for instance, Beehaw communities are more heavily moderated), but for Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml the difference is so small it's not worth the hassle.
tell that to everyone else. shit like this will make all even more useless than it already is.
Crossposting already exists. That way you have one "main post" and a couple of openly linked crossposts in other communities that redirect to the main post, which makes it easy to filter out "duplicates" as the posts are already bundled in a way. There is no reason to make the same "main post" multiple times.
...and if you meant to combine the comment sections across all communities and instances into a single big comment cluster linked to the main post, then please keep in mind that different communities have different rules. A comment made from a user in Community 1 might be appropiate in Community 1 but inappropiate in Community 2 where the post also appears. How would you moderate this if all comments appeared in both Community 1 and 2 at the same time?
I actually thought of it more as a purely visual combine. So each post still lives in its own instance, and visually you just see them together. Comment threads would live on different instances and the instance mods just mods the community that they own. So it’s a purely Frontend thing.
I understand that, but the "dubious" comment would still appear in the comment thread on both instances then, and that can turn into a problem. How do you deal with it?
Just to make an example: I moderate a community about Breath of the Wild, where content about the sequel Tears of the Kingdom are discouraged so that people who don't own that game yet won't have to worry about spoilers. There are also communities about both games, or even just the sequel, where "spoilers" simply aren't an issue. Now imagine someone makes a post that appears in both communities, and the comment section contains content related to the sequel. How would you deal with it?
Remove the comments about the sequel because the BotW community doesn't allow spoilers? That's a surefire way to piss off anyone subscribed to the TotK community, because they were simply discussing content they're subscribed to and won't understand what they did wrong or why their comments keep disappearing.
Let the comments stay because the TotK community allows them? That's a surefire way to piss off people subscribed to the BotW sub, as they were promised a spoiler-free browsing experience and now read about stuff they didnt want to read about. You cannot un-see spoilers, so "just deal with it" isn't an option.
Make it so that those comments are only displayed in the TotK community but not in the BotW community? That's what we have right now - separate comment sections for each community. If you merge the comment sections and then retroactively have to sort out which comments are or are not displayed in the other sub, it will be an unneccessary extra workload for the mods as you can barely automate such a thing. And you would have to check every comment again as soon as someone makes a crosspost to a third, fourth, fifth community, as this would add extra rules that would make comments that were formerly comepletely fine suddenly not okay anymore.
Now this is an example where the issue are "just" gameplay spoilers, so it's not exactly the end of the world. But once this happens to communities with different rulesets about politics, religion, NSFW content, things that are illegal in one country but not the other, and similar highly explosive topics, it will turn into a moderation nightmare to keep the comment section fair for everyone.
The main post would be shared but then in the comment section you can swipe left or right to scroll through the different instances (comment section). Most comment sections don't have such unique requirements anyways, usually on Reddit I just assume "don't be an asshole" and on the few occasions where that is not sufficient, I get deleted and the mod notifies me of the error, then I learn. Generally people won't familiarize themselves with the community rules before posting.
w o r l d n e w s
Its not really surprising to see duplicate from what are basically all 'general-purpose' instances. Merging duplicate posts into one would be a great solution.
Each instance can have their own rules and mods, I have already encountered power tripping mods on lemmy.world, I can choose other instances with the same threads with different mods.
Eh, it's a benefit and a drawback. For those of us that don't use browsers to access lemmy, crossposting is much harder for one thing. Then you've got bots and people that don't even know that crossposting exists at all.
But, the ability to choose which communities you block and thus streamline your feed is too big a benefit to really be infuriating in natural general. Once there's a built in way to migrate block lists, it'll be even less infuriating.
But yeah, you gotta block the bots that don't crosspost correctly, or they're utter spam machines. If users behave as bots, gotta block them too. It sucks, but it's miles better than trying to artificially limit communities.
It's a UI issue and not really an issue with how Fediverse communities work, if the same link is posted in multiple communities it should ideally show you only one of them in your feed. The user would be able to specify how he wants to discriminate between the same links: most recent one, most active one etc... It shouldn't be difficult to do at the UI level.
Which one? Most upvotes? Highest total score? Most interacted with (e.g. most comments)? The instance you visit the most? Some combination of these?
That could be a user setting, just like you specify how you want to rank the threads in your feed, you could specify also how to discriminate between threads that are sharing the same link: you could say you want the most recent one for example. Again, this could easily be done at the UI level.
i'd want the comment chains merged
This sounds good in theory, but it's going to be difficult if the communities have different rules. A comment made on the post in Community 1 might be okay IN Community 1 but innappropiate in Community 2 ... how would you deal with this if the comment section was merged and appeared in both communties?
its not a UI issue when there are comments from 10 different communities.
And that is IMO a false problem. It is perfectly okay to have completely different discussions around the same link, just like currently you can have the same link shared on Reddit, Hacker News and other link aggregators and you obviously end up with completely different discussions around the same link.
This whole "there's too much fragmentation" drama is IMO a false problem raised by people who don't fully understand that the Fediverse does not mean that you will have one single big entity with synchronized rules and one single community per topic globally. It means that you will have something like multiple independently run "forums", with different vibes and potentially different moderation rules, and users in federated "forums" can easily hop from one to another with the same account. It doesn't mean that you'll have one single large Reddit replacement with communities that are deemed "similar" forcibly merged to prevent the false problem of "fragmentation".
The internet would be in a completely sorry state if only one forum per topic was allowed.
thats not whats happening. you're either getting the same comments in all places or you're arbitrarily preventing people from commenting all in 1 place to prop up this guise of "freedom" that exists at the will of the instance admins.
how? how are the comments on https://lemmy.world/post/2342759 and https://lemmy.world/post/2244006 the same?
everyone in both those comment sections are talking about how bad of a choice this is LOL.
Where…?
Daily Reminder, Discussion is okay. Name caling, vitriol and toxic behaviour is against our community rules. Nothing is worth an argument. Discuss away but leave the aggression at the door.
It goes without saying, but any user included in the post should not be harassed. Those found to be following this person will be banned from the community.
If these are serial reporting, Threads is down by a factor of 8. Could be more. Antelope FWY 1/128 mile.
It seems useful to have bots serial posting for a while, within some limits.
These forums have a chicken and egg problem - need posts to get commentors, need the commentors to incintivise posters. Also just need content in general to get any readers.
But I'm in general agreement that recently the feeds haven't been too smooth on Lemmy and that take a lot away from the browsing experience.
You probably have to stick to one of the communities. That's what I do to avoid this kind of issues.
I do it, and honestly I wish there was a way to post a "Connect" Post or something that would appear to the three I post to
There is a cross post button. It adds a link under the post when opened to show other communities it has been cross posted to, but it doesn't solve the original problem.
Yeah that's what I use, but when I post to Dungeon and Dragon, and TTRPG if someone is part of those they will see two times my post :/ but if Communities linked to a post where like a tag on the post, the same post would be showed In both communities but it would stay the same post, but maybe that's approaching what Mastodon is and not Lemmy
Ah I see what you are meaning. I'm not sure if that would always be a good thing, even reddit keeps different comment pages for different communities in cross posts because different communities have different conversations.
I don't have any better way of solving this problem, other than perhaps having the app or frontend collapse the duplicates into a single item that indicates the different communities it's in and let's you pick which comments to open.
I don't see the issue, it's not a duplicate post, it's 3 separate posts by the same person into different communities.
I hate that. I wished there was a way to block terms or hide all previous posts so that you can hide a whole lot of them that you're not interested in reading.
There is discussion on going at !news@lemmy.world currently about new rules. Users posting the same story from the same source will be blocked by an automod. I asked about users posting the same story from different sources, and apparently that's absolutely fine. So expect this problem to get a lot worse before steps have to be taken to make it better :/
There are a lot of bots still here so I wouldn't be all that surprised.
Conversely I'm having the similar issue of blocking one community but then different communities with the same name and content still appear on my feed as if I never blocked them at all. Like playing whack-a-mole.
I don't think this is all that dissimilar from how Reddit was though if you were subscribed to two world news subreddits and two technology subreddits. I think the key is picking out the more popular communities and only subscribing to those. Eventually the goal would be for the less popular communities to fizzle out in favor of bigger communities.