One thing I hope to see in the Fediverse is people engaging with old content

Corroded@leminal.space to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 244 points –

This is a thought I had mostly to do with Lemmy but I feel likes it's relevant elsewhere in Fediverse.

As far as I know Lemmy doesn't lock posts after a set amount of time like Reddit does and I feel like this is a good thing for smaller niche communities. For example if I created one for a one off video game or cancelled TV show it could be hard to generate new content to post to really help it take off. It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

I feel like I haven't see it a ton yet but I hope it's a way Lemmy and the Fediverse can be different from sites like Reddit.

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I've noticed that some people do use other filters than "Hot" or they scroll back in smaller communities, because I'll occasionally get comment replies to posts I made months ago. It's cool to see.

Let's all agree right now that we're not going to be a community that necro-shames.

EDIT: JUST TO BE CLEAR I MEAN MAKING PEOPLE FEEL BAD FOR POSTING IN OLD THREADS AND ONLY THAT ONE USAGE OF THE TERM

We don't know how the fediverse would play out in the long term but I expect a few things:

  • Lemmy devs will implement locking old posts in the future
  • instance owners will decide on their post locking policies
  • Many instances will not survive for as long as Reddit survived till today
  • Third party archivers (perhaps archive.org among others) will need to step in and archive posts. Ofc archived posts is not interactible.

I agree with your points. Especially the third one. I do hope a majority of instances op-out of locking posts but I could see large instances like lemmy.world definitely jumping to do it and focus more on new content and expansion

It would be good if a comment bumped a thread to the top of the "new" feed.

flashbacks to single word "bump" posts

Nothing was more infuriating that being on a tech forum, seeing someone post the same problem you were having, 4-5 bumps, then the OP saying "Nevermind, I got it" and the thread closing

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Does the Active feed work this way?

Active is a combination of that and hot but is essentially hard capped at 2 days. Things past that wont show up

Theres the new comments sort which works like that though

There’s a “sort [posts] by new comments” option.

To me, this option works much better than "Active", "Hot" and others.

There is also the option to sort by "active," which is not exactly what you are describing but makes it more likely to see older content. Some apps default to this sorting mode

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This is the way it should be.

I've never understood the people who get upset over 'necroing' a thread, whether it is on an old school forum or something formatted like Reddit.

Maybe something similar to do with 'beating a dead horse'

the problem/issue was (potentially) already discussed, and renewing the issue is tiresome for the regulars who see it repetitively brought up? This is just my guess.

For technical discussion, sure. I'll be one of the first people to say look at the sticky, look at the pins, look at the megathread, read the FAQ, read the wiki.

For purely social discussion like casual chat, entertainment discussion, or random musings, I would say it doesn't make sense.

If it is about a problem they had and the thread didn't have an answer, then they should be obliged to necro if they found a solution.

I think it necroing posts on Reddit makes sense. There's a lot of very specific posts that can vary slightly from each other but I find with forums you can get a general post for a topic that has 30+ pages of responses and it can be a bit of a pain to comb through all of them at times. In my experience I see a lot of people linking to other comments in the forum because something has already been brought up a few times.

This is basically what @technomad@slrpnk.net said about beating a dead horse but I feel like it's slightly more tolerable with a Reddit style system where there's more posts with at least minor differences. It's a bit easier to follow.

This could also just be the forums that I have used shaping my opinion

Oddly enough, just last week I got a reddit notification that someone had replied to a comment I made... 11 years ago.

One thing standing in the way of this is the inability to move identities in Lemmy/Kbin. This is my 3rd time with a "Maximum Derek" user in the Threadiverse; my first was on Kbin back in June when it was really struggling, then I went to a Lemmy instance that just disappeared one day. If you try to engage with any of my posts I made while on those servers, I'll never know it.

I miss the old OpenID way.

We need a very, very simple ID server that everybody should be able to install, even as an app for smartphones and ActivityPub (and others) able to communicate to.

I guess self hosting is the only sure way

I hope this one works better! I signed up at tchncs when I started Lemmy, and it seems like I chose well :)

I've had it happen that i joined a community and commented in some interesting thread and only then noticed that it was 3 or even 6 months old

Perfectly fine in my opinion. It isn't like oldschool forums where a reply bumps a thread to page 1.

I've seen comments and replies on my posts, that came weeks or months after I made them. I'll respond to them if they are anything more than "Haha yeah that's cool!"

There has to be more to add to the conversation, otherwise it will be like posting a 3 year old article to the news community.

I definitely encourage people not to be shy to post and comment on stale communities that haven't seen recent activity, that can get the ball rolling to revive it.

It will definitely start to happen more as more forums start to join the fediverse (discourse for Eg).

Aren't forums absolutely notorious for forbidding "thread necromancy"?

Yeah necroposting is almost always frowned upon in favor of making a new post.

Forms vary with those types of rules. I absolutely hate the ones that are autolocking after a few days/months.

Hm I always avoid replying to anything older than, say, 2 days because I assume it's pointless and/or it annoys people

Pointless part I can understand, but annoying? What's more, it should prove what you make effort to post can still get engagement over time, and not scattered to winds.

I work with a product enjoying a 27 year support window.

That's WAY more than 2 days.

Same, old habit from reddit, probably because it's so huge it was hard to get seen when something was an hour old, much less a day. I probably shouldn't do that here.

Depends on the content and context. Some older post, even years old, might totally okay for discussion. Just like those traditional forums with years of ongoing threads.

ive been runnin kbin for > 6 months... its kind of neat how i get comments from months ago from some new instance that just spun up somewhere, or some newer user commenting on older stuff out there in the ether.

youre right though, gotta stick with your account once you have it.. its like email. very targeted.

It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community's feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community's home instance is on another server. So if you're a user on - say - leminal.space and you're the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community's old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you've subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn't exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they're the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

This can't be true, right? I swear I've subscribed to communities or magazines and have seen older posts on them before. Otherwise, they'd always be blank.

It means you weren't the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.

Gotcha. Well that's annoying. They should definitely fix that before version 1.0.

You can pull posts and comments into an instance by searching their original link in the search bar. It's a bit clunky and doesn't transfer vote counts but it works.

I do hope it's fixed in the future since it is annoying, though since all the APub services have this issue, even the very polished ones it might be a while.

I thought you still got all the posts, just not any of the comments?

I find myself commenting on “older” posts fairly frequently, I’m not actually upset at there being “less” content.

This place feels like Reddit did 15 years ago.

This is more of a front end thing. Mastodon sometimes revives old content by people boosting an old post that could go viral again. Lemmy's algo is designed around hiding older posts as they age. I could see this being more relevant in upcoming software like Discourse and phpbb which are adding fedi support. They're more traditional old-school forum software and I think that revives older content better, as one user commenting on an old post will bring up a thread to the top again.

traditional old-school forum software and I think that revives older content better, as one user commenting on an old post will bring up a thread to the top again.

Lemmy does this if you use the "New Comments" sort method

We're referring to discovering old posts here, not when you already have a post open.

Doubt it as they will get buried anyways. Forums should be more common and even they autolock threads. At some point in time you have to reframe the content into the current cultural context.

I get what you mean but I think it's a decent way to breath some life into older small communities and show the people posting there it wasn't for nothing. The relevancy of a post doesn't always have to fade as well.

I still prefer people posting new content but I think engaging with old posts can be beneficial.

I lost count of the posts on Reddit, which i found really interesting, reading all comments and eagerly wanting to post a comment myself, just to see the lock

I often find I can't see old posts in active communities, and on masto my instance only holds 2w worth of cache because the owner is but one man not a corpo with endless storage.

Some content does get locked but usually it's when the comments go off the rails, so it's pretty rare

On Reddit or here you mean?

I think they are talking about moderators locking threads. There should maybe be a "lock for 30 days" option that would allow threads to open up after things cool down. Although if a post led to abuse in the past, perhaps it is likely to do the same later on.