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.
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.
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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 :/
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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.
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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)
Who said anything about language barriers?
you did.
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.
Why do people insist that there needs to be (for example) /c/politics on every instance?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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But I have to say that’s a plus. I’m on Lemmy.ca and beehaw.org is federated with my instance so I can interact with their communities. I have noticed that discussions on [email protected] are different from those on [email protected]. I think that’s the beauty of Fediverse.
It’s like being in a technology club in France and then visiting the technology club in Germany. They may look like the same clubs on the surface, but then you realize that these clubs have different interests and the discussions are different because the worldviews of the two clubs are different.
That’s true for some communities, but for instance [email protected] and [email protected] are pretty similar, and tend to have the same content posted by bots.
I can understand why this can be annoying.
Absolutely! While communities might share a name across multiple instances, the content and discussions can be quite different.
The solution is crossposting. If the threads on OP are all by the same user, then they should be crossposting, and mods should be warning them to do so.
It needs to be enabled on more mobile apps then.
I kinda like things this way. The idea is that instance A will have their own users talking about news article Z while instance B will also be talking about it, each with their own perspectives.
Right now it feels like all the discussions are the same because Lemmy and Kbin haven’t had time to evolve and differentiate themselves much just yet. As far as I can tell there’s two types of early adopters populating this ecosystem: Left-leaning tech folks and right-leaning trolls testing the waters to see how much attention they can get. That might just be the communities I subscribed to though 🤷
and that isn’t how any platform works. this deliberate fragmentation will continue to kill lemmy’s potential and means any small coms will never get populated.
Who says the have to? Why are you wanting this to be like Reddit, even on Reddit there’s lots of thriving communities (subreddits) with under 500 users.
It’s what people make of it, and clearly this place isn’t for you, so move on.
Hell you even used a fucking Reddit trope as your username… shows what you expect here lmfao.
why is being like reddit a bad thing? it’s the best link aggregator on the internet. until new released the site was great. imagine not wanting a link aggregator like reddit before they made their own app and doomed the UX to modernized oblivion.
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reddit is dying because of the company, no other reason. acting like this place is some how better when the largest of nitch subs barely get 2 posts a week is simply ignorant.
It’s just not your cup of tea, and that’s fine, the door is over there.
You don’t go to a techno club demanding they become a dance club because all clubs have to be the same do you? How’s this any different…?
Club is the community and techno and dance are the instances, they have stuff in common as well as being different.
The only ignorance here is you wanting this to be something it has zero intention of ever being. This isn’t Reddit, nor does it want to be be. How is this so hard for you to comprehend…?
That would require an inter-instance mod cooperation. Not impossible, but between some instances it seems like the Iron Curtain.
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.
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
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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 [email protected] 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.
Maybe some future feature could combine them
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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w o r l d n e w s
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.
