(Major event happens) "I should post immediately without first checking if there are already 30 other posts about this"

Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 295 points –

Title ☝️

49

To be fair, there are multiple instances and communities. If there was only one post, there’s no guarantee that everyone on the fediverse would see it.

The system is not designed to provide one consistent view of all its contents.

If people would at least just check the community they're posting to, it would help immensely.

Cross-posting existing posts also helps immensely to cut down on the clutter. I've done that, from larger communities to smaller ones that I wanted to help grow. I've never tried changing the title to see if it still connects, but maybe so, if someone wanted/needed (for the specific rules of the community) to do that.

Thing is, a cross post is nothing special. It's a) a post with an identical link, and b) a post with "cross posted from..." appended to the body content.

It is still just a post. Lemmy (and k/mbin) just attempt to mask the fact there are multiple of them.

I don't know if it can be done any better though, ActivityPub has quite a few quirks.

So if the title were changed from the original, it would still recognize it as a cross post, somehow? Perhaps based on it sharing an identical URL, or something added when you go into the cross-posting interface - if so then I suppose as you said the text in the body about the fact that it's cross-posted. Hrm, and phrased differently, if someone were to share an identical URL independently, so not going through the cross-posting interface at all, would Lemmy and K/Mbin still recognize it as a cross-post?

Thanks for that insight. So if OP meant from a traffic standpoint, then yeah I see it doesn't help at all. It also still splits the comments across the entire Fediverse, rather than concentrating them into like a megathread. And people could upvote multiple posts, and comment inside multiple ones, etc., so it actually increases traffic to have them split up, perhaps not quite as much as fully independent posts but more than if they were singular ones.

Whereas from a UX standpoint, it is so helpful to tidy things up to see e.g. one post shared to 5-20 communities rather than each of those showing up as its own individual post, taking up most of your feed even after you've already consumed the content and want to see what else is going on. And as we are seeing, each community has its own slant on the type of discussions that they want to have, so even if the posts could be conjoined somehow, into like a pseudo-megathread, the impact of that would hit very differently than allowing them to be different (cross-)posts. So cross-posting seems a nice balance between fully individual vs. fully conjoined:-).

Still not that simple. A beehaw users could post something first and you and I wouldn't see it but others would.

What is beehaw, and why wouldn't we see it?

Soooooo, their logic is "we want to build a community" but also "we disagree with open registrations, and want to seperate from the two biggest instances on Lemmy".

That's like throwing a party, and then getting nervous when people show up.

That was a year ago, the fediverse was (and is) growing by leaps and bounds; basically all instances were dealing with DDoSes and huge waves of obviously scripted account-creation. AFAIK beehaw federates with both of those instances again.

I'm pretty ambivalent about federation. If an instance wants to be a private forum and not federate that's up to them and a valid use case I guess. I personally prefer instances that federate with basically everyone and let me block per user/instance myself but to each their own.

and let me block per user/instance myself but to each their own.

What?! No, that's censorship! Let us do the blocking.

/s

They did it so early I'm not sure how much of that was an issue. And no, while they did say it could be reversed later on, it never has been. Last I heard they were considering leaving Lemmy entirely.

Just checked and you're right.

But still, that's the beauty of federation to me, they're still using the same interoperable standard so if I want to see them I can spin up my own instance or find one of the ones they still federate.

Agreed, that's their prerogative. It did seem to stunt their growth but without wanting to take on more admins they may be fine with that.

If people would at least just check the community they're posting to, it would help immensely.

Added emphasis to previous statement.

It still wouldn't help. If two instances block each other, but neither of them blocks a third instance, and someone from one of the first two joins a community in the third, then that person won't see posts in that community from members of the blocked instance.

It would make a difference is all I'm saying.

Perfect and better are not mutually exclusive concepts.

img

I thought that would be different here, but sadly is not. lol

I mean... the scope of the issue is different here.:-)

What I like is that it is still possible to have an excellent conversation here. On Reddit I gave up all hope of that, and was leaving it regardless of finding here or not. I suppose I would just touch grass, read books, play games - the things we used to do before social media. And I do all that too, but also I found that here, you can sometimes have an enjoyable conversation, whereas there you basically never could, towards the end. 🙄

And the tools themselves will get better, over time - e.g. the upcoming Sublinks.:-)

Hey did you guys hear that Trump got shot and Richard Simmons died?

Rings a bell, but if you wouldn't mind posting it to the same community that already has 6 of each, that would be greeeeat.

This is the way I find out richard simmons died??? I thought he was supposed to be super in shape, and healthy?

Is it really a problem though? Most things on Lemmy are memes scrolling by. When something interesting happens and people post about it in multiple posts, is it really the most important thing to complain about multiple posts?

1 more...

But if you take time to check if anyone else posted about it, you might waste so much time that you won't be the first to post about it!

Is it sad that despite all the posts annoying you, I hadn't yet heard the trump shooting news the first time I saw this thread. I skipped it, and thought "meh".

Now, seeing this post hours later I realize what you were referencing. But I hadn't seen any posts about it when you first posted this.

A cool feature for the fediverse could be some kind of aggregated view and a way for the community to link common topic threads.

Some of those were hilarious, like the one who didn't know there were shots, so he just said he collapsed then was escorted off the stage, or the "I wish he would Van Gogh away" one

I dunno, there is some minor utility in that you can gauge how major an event is, or at least is perceived to be, by how many posts are made about it shortly after happening and how long they continue to appear or persist.

i hate how good filters and content warnings are on mastodon and how terrible they are on lemmy like how?

I'm not into micro blogging, so am unfamiliar with a lot of the intricacies of Mastodon, but that does sound like it would be a good feature to port over here.

Well everybody likes to think they're original.

(I did check the comments before I posted this and am vaguely disappointed that I am.)

Bad take. I bet you're a weirdo who likes megathreads too.

The best part about Fedi is that it's decentralized. If some important event is happening in the world, I don't want to see it sequestered in one or two threads I might miss, I want to see that info blasted across my entire feed.

Especially this kind of Info... I want it blasted all over my ti.... feed.

That's not what they're saying. When Trump got shot last night, c/News had like 15 threads about it. Some of them like 2 hours later. It was ridiculous.

And miss my chance at getting a butt-load of upvotes which I can use to...feel good about myself?

No thanks