Agreed the cross posting is much more visible and irritating. Not sure it will ever be resolved as it is a fundamental architecture design of the Fediverse. I would hate to see another closed source site be the main alternative but Squabbles is growing fast and with the new app looking so good it may accelerate its growth. Time will tell.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
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I don't think the architecture has anything to do with it. The algorithms just need improving.
There's no algorithm in the fediverse. That's one of the main selling points.
The feed present on Kbin and Lemmy that delivers content that is "hot" is still an algorithm, it just isn't a hyper-specific one like you'd see on Tik Tok
Sorting by new also is an algorithm.
Not trolling here: I think this is something the fediverse will need to decide at some point. What are the acceptance criteria for timeline presentations? But this would also be a perfect example of diversity: don’t like the way our instance sorts your timeline? No problem, here’s some instances that do it differently.
The goal should be to allow users to choose their own algorithm, including third party algorithms you can install yourself or something.
Sure, but the algorithms themselves will have to be provided by the instance, so I guess different instance might make different choices, for example due to privacy concerns etc.
You could engineer it so users could provide their own algorithm.
It would be a HARD engineering problem, but not impossible, IMO.
Yes, I meant "recommendation algorithm" or "based on dataming algorithm" - I should have been more clearer.
We have various "sorting", "time" and "weight/vote" based algorithms of course.
Even if it just shows the post with most activity once, links to other communities versions inside with comments. Uniqueness determined by url and or title similarity.
Essentially this - just (as much as anything is 'just' in software dev) have any posts pointing to the same link from any community in a collapsible list under the top instance, perhaps prioritizing ones that the user is subscribed to for convenience. Users could then expand the list to see where it is being discussed if desired.
I have said it before, I'd like a universal comment section for the link itself (or maybe topic or timeline specific, mod-linked as well) and a separate one for each article (ideally something longer than a paragraph) that can be easily switched.
Even better if the feed showed the URL and grouped the articles based site-wide stats and user-specific preferences.
The only problem is that sometimes the same link will be posted to different communities for both positive and negative reasons.
Reddit used to have the "other discussions" tab for that sort of thing.
But that's what I'm saying about (Kbin) articles. As in I expect each community to add their thoughts/perspective (or even a break-down) in the form of an article (and then people in said community comment on that). Multiple people maybe, if takes are different enough.
Also I'm saying it should be a faster switch than "other discussions" (which requires going to a separate page first).
#Mastodon has a feature where it’ll consolidate all the most linked to URLs in its explore tag. It doesn’t take you too any toots about the discussion, but shows that something similar is possible, even with federation involved.
Upvoted for the convo, but disagree on the sentiment.
If I followed 10 different subreddits on technology, I'd imagine I'd be getting a lot of the same content. I know that reddit as a whole was a shitshow when things went pear-shaped for Twitter and the early days of Elon Musk for example.
I think that eventually, we will reach a level of content creation where people either don't feel the need to cross post, or that you don't need to subscribe to 10 closely-related magazines.
I think that eventually, we will reach a level of content creation where people either don't feel the need to cross post, or that you don't need to subscribe to 10 closely-related magazines.
I hope so, but there seem to be a significant amount of people who think that every instance should be their own community. I don’t quite understand what they even want federation for then, but they are very outspoken.
There has been no lack of outspokenness from people who want monolithic mega-groups or post deduplication. The topic gets posts with full discussions daily at this point, and people have been spilling over the fence from the other side for days on end to immediately complain that they're seeing groups with the same name, and expressing worry that they'll miss something interesting because they're used to reading 10 posts from popular subreddit and assuming that's all of value that was said on the topic that day.
You just don't see them as outspoken because you agree with them.
I completely understand the sentiment while simultaneously completely disagreeing. The idea of the fediverse, and seeing it play out explicitly with the various multiple posts and other things is kind of sexy to me in a technological and aspirational sense. I dig how janky this whole thing can sometimes be. It's part of the appeal for me. As it matures and becomes more streamlined over time all of that will surely change and get cleaner and easier to use. Which will be awesome to see. But I greatly appreciate what it is now for the time that it will be. Being in close to the ground floor of this is really fun. I loved Usenet back in the day. I remember and loved reddit at the very very beginning. I love and appreciate this shit for what it is while it still is this. This has legs. And people will be nostalgic for this time later on. Love it now too while enjoying watching it grow.
Depends on the visualization. We could group similar posts into one and show it as a group, using the space for a single post.
Have you already forgotten what the front page of Reddit looks like? Whenever anything interesting happens in the world it’s full of the same thing.
I wonder what's going to kill the whole Fediverse tomorrow. Seems after like a week of vacation from Reddit all' the most excitable people can only agree on one thing: this place is very, very doomed unless it changes everything right now.
Maybe if every instance just redirects to Reddit (or some kind of front-end so it looks like it has a different name but all of the same people, problems, etc.) then people will be happy.
...Yes I'm getting grumpy at all' the complaining before anyone's had a chance to deal with or figure out anything, let alone sort out proper solutions and start patching things. Please, try to have some patience.
There was just an update posted regarding lemmy that would allow for community merging. This is really going to be a game changer if they can figure out how to work that properly.
That sounds amazing. I hadn't seen that, do you have the link?
This sounds like a feature that couldn't be implemented properly without users being confused. There are different posting rules for each community. It would be too much to keep up with.
Consolidating communities could be done sort of like multireddits, basically just an organizational tool, which didn't confuse people about the different rules, because it was clear which subreddit individual posts were on, and rules were clearly displayed in sidebars.
It could work in a different way, where the communities are more thoroughly merged, but there would be no reason for it to be anything but voluntary for the moderators of the individual communities. Presumably, the rules of the combined community would be something that would be discussed and decided on between the moderators of the individual communities that would enforce the rules.
10 different technology boards
If you find that you're subscribed to lot of communities that share the same content / discussions, then it might be time to unsubscribe from some of them. I'd bet many of those subs have different cadence in replies, even though they post the same headlines? Just pick the one that has best discussions and participation.
Just tone down your subscriptions and get rid of the noise until you can hear the signal again.
This is probably a pipe dream, but I’d like to see a feature where any number of articles in a single user’s feed that shares the same exact link just gets grouped together into a “super magazine” or something.
- You’d only see either the earliest or most local instance of the link on your feed with an indicator of it’s “super magazine” status.
- When you click on a super magazine, you’d see just one link and a federated list of all the articles that included it. Each item in the list would mention who posted it and where it was posted.
- Clicking on one of the items in the article list would set which comment section you access. (Or screw it, just federate all the comments into one massive comment section. Toggling an item from the article list would only set which article you’d post a new thread to.)
I had the same idea and wanted to write a little userscript to achieve this. Sadly Kbin doesn't make it easy to do this, since the actual link is not exposed on the threads page and only accessible after you clicked the link. That makes it super hard to "group by link". I mean you could "fetch" every link for every post but that would put so much unnecessary traffic to the site so that I would rather not do that.
I don't understand this specific complaint.
If you are subscribed to similar communities that exist on different servers/instances, then the likelihood of someone from each community posting the link is pretty high (especially if it is big news). If you are subscribed to 5/5 gaming communities that exist across lemmy, kbin, beehaw, and others, then yes, you are going to see similar content each time. I don't see how this is a problem because it seems to be working as intended.
If you're wanting to be subscribed to each because of the opportunity to engage in the comments with others, then just ignore the repeated content. Coming from Reddit, it was common to see the same post on gaming, pcgaming, & pcmasterrace. There's always going to be overlap.
I understand the complaint, there just isn't enough content in my subscriptions to spend all my time there, and with the fediverse growing every day I spend most of my time here on All TopDay to explore new communities. That being said, people need to recognize this is a growing pain and it will level out. Personally it's given me time to reflect on how much I was using Reddit and helps me put it down instead of doom scrolling constantly, so I don't mind lol.
One UI change that could address this somewhat would be that if multiple communities post the same link, the discussions are grouped together in an expandable box on the main page. That wouldn't require any voodoo magic to merge the threads, and it would make room on the main page for things other than news about reddit.
I think it will be like this until the Reddit drama calms down and people either move off Reddit or stay there.
I do worry about the amount of content here that is Reddit related
Give it couple of months. It was the same last year with the "Twitter migration". A whole lot of people joined Mastodon and there was about a month of discussions around two topics - 1) just how much Twitter sucked and 2) just how confusing fediverse was.
Then most people went back to Twitter and things calmed down.
Haha I love seeing federation explained in every single post /s
I think there are multiple reasons for this.
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Lots of new users (me included) who don't know the ins and outs of Lemmy are joining. Some may not find the right communities for their posts (e.g. if they don't exist on their instance, but on another) and post it to a somewhat related community on theirs.
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There are many communities (often one per instance) that deal with the same topic, therefore generating similar posts in reaction to an event relating to that topic. While they might consolidate somewhat over time, I see it more as a feature than a bug of the fediverse. You could pick the one(s) you like most and unsubscribe from the rest.
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Until there is a critical mass of users niche content will get little to no engagement while big current topics get almost all of it. These posts will be up there when sorting by top, hot or active, I'd imagine. Maybe you could solve that by sorting by newest.
Works on Reddit
I've seen your kind of post about 1/5th as much as the reddit ones... think I'll post about not liking how many posts about posts there are...
It's not an issue of fediverse but an issue of kbin/lemmy apps. More better approach can be thought such that some related articles would be grouped to one title.
I'd argue that this in large part reflects both the fragmented nature of communities at present and also limited focus at present. Both should dilute as the fediverse expands and/or communities consolidate. If people are subscirbed to 5 versions of Gaming for example, then the same links might explode in all the communities subbed to.
But I have no doubt you're right that this also reflects stuff needing developing - for example algorithms to help sort "All" or "subbed" and renove (or even consolidate duplicates in some way) is going to be needed.
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