Remote View

1y ago

probably my biggest gripe with Lemmy right now. Feels like I'm just stuck in a loop.

155 comments

If people would use the lemmy cross posting functionality it would only show up once.
- Indeed, unfortunately most of the mobile apps don't implement that feature
  
  I think ljdawson is working on it for Sync. I assume that's why he held off on implementing posting.
  
  I didn’t even realize this was a thing already. The apps need to add this ASAP, seems like a pretty vital part of making the experience smooth.
- if people do cross posts, will i see the post only once?
  will lemmy detect that i can see the original + 3 crossposts and show me only the original?
  this is more like a feature request, i don't think we are there yet.
  we could also aggregate and sync comments across cross postings, so that the post is really just one, but posted in more than one community.
  
  Yes, this is how it works in lemmy-ui. In this following example someone posted to !technology@beehaw.org and I pressed the cross-post button and cross-posted it to !firefox@lemmy.ml:
  
  And if you cross post it to more then one there will be just a list of them.
  
  if people do cross posts, will i see the post only once?
  will lemmy detect that i can see the original + 3 crossposts and show me only the original?
  On the website, it does
- Man Memmy needs that ASAP..
- Oh wow I didn't know such thing existed on Lemmy

Sort by Top 6 Hours vs Hot or Active
- This was a game changer for me when I saw someone suggest it
- Top 6 gang
- all of the posts in the screenshot were less than 6 hours old, so that probably wouldn't help
  
  except that those three are probably calculated differently from each other
  
  It would give you the top posts from the last 6 hours so they should go away.
  Hot or Active give you a lot of stuff that would fall under "New".
  Edit: I just looked at the top 20 posts on my Top (6H) feed and they all have 200 points or more. All of the posts on your screen shot have less than 20.
- This is top 6 hours.

Eh. Eventually one of them would win out. I posted the same link in movies@lemmy.world and moviesandtv@lemmy.film. The first one hasn’t had any comments where as the second one has more than a dozen comments. I know where I’ll post the next time.
- A lot of people seem to have forgotten (or maybe just weren't around at the time) but there were tons of duplicate communities on reddit during the first years too. Over time their mods either agreed to close one and point everyone to the other or the less active ones faded away naturally.
  One problematic scenario I can envision with that approach on Lemmy however is the mods of news@lemmysite1 and news@lemmysite2 agreeing to keep the first one alive, but then after a while lemmysite1 closes for whatever reason. So we're left with news@lemmysite2 which is a ghost town. Probably not a big deal for a news community, but for something with a lot of info on a particular topic it's not really ideal.
  
  Already happened for the Android community. Hopefully the new one gets bigger than the old one

Do you wake up on the same snowy day, every day, with Sonny and Cher's "I got you babe" playing on the clock radio?
- Nah, but I can't seem to get out of this retro hotel room. It's freezing in here, and "We've Only Just Begun" by The Carpenters keeps playing from the clock radio even though I unplugged it.

I suggested an idea to fix this, that I called "thread entanglement". I had suggested it for Kbin specifically, before, but honestly the base Lemmy software could use something like this. I'd love to see some sort of smart merging of duplicate threads like this be possible.
- As others have mentioned in that thread. It would be better as an option from the user side rather than site wide forced implementation. I hope you open a GitHub issue/discussion in the repository so the idea could get more exposure.
- Adding this as an issue on the Lemmy GitHub would be a great idea.

If the title text is the same it should just squash them, show you all the options on further inspection.
- This is my preferred option. Requires no underlying change to ActivityPub or federation, just makes the end user experience more pleasant until/unless communities gain more distinct personalities that would result in fewer reposts.
- Better yet, it should semi-force you to post as a crosspost which would remove the duplicate from end user feeds. Especially if there's already a post on another community with a matching content link.

My biggest gripe right now is how often everything goes down. About 6 times out of 10 when I go to load anything on lemmy it is down, confirmed on https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/
- lemmy.world got too big IMO. So I ended up switching to a different instance. If all the users were to evenly distribute themselves across many instances, and not just have everyone on like 1-3 different instances, I think that the issues with unavailability, lag, and whatnot would happen much less.
- I had the most issues on my lemmy.world account. I've had less issues on my lemmy.ca account, maybe try making an account on a different instance? World has been getting attacked a lot lately.
- I'm actually trying to solve this issue on my own Lemmy app. It automatically switches instances when the requested one is down. Works only in the Feed right now and, of course, accounts are still instance-bound - but I will fix that soon.
- After I went to my local instance of lemmy, sdf.org, I have literally zero issue
- considering hopping onto a different instance because of this. Lemmy.world in particular always seems to be experiencing issues.
  
  I personally wouldn't use one the larger instances, as they're usually going to have the most issues (more complex deployments, longer maintenance downtimes, etc)
  
  I am most comfortable with lemmy.world because of their old reddit formatting. It made the transition easy. Call it lazy or low brain, but maybe if other instances will also do the old format, they might get more users shifting to their instances too?
  Still trying to learn here, but so far I find myself jumping back to old.lemmy.world simple because of familiarity.
- This is why it wasn't until we didn't commit to migrating /r/android over until lemdro.id was setup for us (!android@lemdro.id).

It's just like browsing r/all on reddit. We did it, Lemmy!

Keep in mind you can always block communities you're not interested in to prevent them from appearing in any feed. I've already blocked plenty of communities to make the "All" post list digestable.
- There are so many though. I'm trying to prune politics from my feed but people keep making new goddamn communities - a dozen isn't enough, apparently - and then crossposting everything everywhere anyway.
- You can also block users, which is super helpful with people that go on crossposting rampages.
- Could you please share the blocked part of the JSON you get with https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim ?
  That could probably help new joiners.
  
  Why would I? The list of communities which one wants to block is very personal / individual. My preferences what I don't want to engage with is purely mine and cannot be transferred to all other users. So any user should make their own decisions what communities they want to block, instead of blindly copying someone elses and potentially missing out on content they would enjoy.

There are a couple of users I recognize just because of the amount of duplicate/triplicate/quadruplicate posts I see from them, often times grouped up like that too.
- Which... Why? There's no karma to farm here, just post it once and let the conversation happen there.
  No offense to anyone, but I'm down voting duplicates to try to stop this shit.
  
  Because there's more then one community of the same topic. They're actually doing a really good thing, they're trying to grow multiple communities. It's not karma farming here, it's supporting communities. That is much preferably then people only submitting to the biggest community and create more centralization.
  
  There are some who are trying to feed content to all communities instead of just choosing.

I'm surprised that no-one's brought out a client that can merge communities. People properly using the cross-posting feature seems to help with this a bit.
- At least if lemmy detects the same link it should view it as a cross-post automatically, even if people didn't use the cross-post UI.
- Fuck yeah! I was just thinking about this the other day. Like a singular mask for all political communities, one for pictures, etc. Almost how Gaim/Pidgin/Adium/Trillion did for the multitude of competing chat programs back in the day.
  
  You're not the first one, here is a open feature request from June 2020 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
  
  I haven't thought of those clients in years. I feel old. Used all of them except Adium, and I think it was just a specific kind of Trillian? Not too sure, it's kind of fuzzy.
  This sentence is being uttered by me more and more the last couple weeks.
  Guess I'll be dead of old age by next month or so. Rip.

On one hand yes annoying but on the other I'm grateful for their effort in generating post

I appreciate the poster sharing the article to multiple communities/instances, but would be nice if the Lemmy front-end could batch these (maybe with a link like "appears in a@b, b@b, c@a ...") if the user + link + title all hashed out to the same thing.
EDIT: Looks like this has already been suggested by Chozo@kbin.social

TIL there's people that still use Yahoo News.
- Hey, free news content sans paywall and an app that does only what it says on the tin. What’s not to like?
  
  Huh, I just looked. I swear it was more cancerous before.

What is worse is that most of those duplicates come from the same poster who are not even cross posting...
- Yeah, it feels so silly, especially with there being no karma
  
  No karma, but they want to spread their ideas.
- It needs to be in the mobile apps.

My biggest gripe is that 3/4th of what I write on here ends in an angry argument, usually somehow about politics (in an area of politics I don't even GAF about!)
Seriously considering just hopping to another instance.
- Listen, I see from what you said, what your worldview and values are, and I'm here to remind you that they're wrong.
  /s
- Let me guess, you're one of those pro-skub people?
  
  No clue what that means so probably not

I'm all in favor of several communities on the same topic as long as they offer different content
Having the same link or picture shared across several communities is just detrimental to the user experience.
Also, to avoid this, maybe we should have core communities for a specific topic (for instance unions), and then they can fork if there is a need (e.g. what happened with !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id )
OP, as of now, I would just suggest to block communities that are too similar.
I only have one tech community as they seemed to all be the same anyway, I'll reassess in a few weeks if I need to select the other one.
- The problem with blocking a community is if you block the one that eventually takes off, you miss out. I am just accepting it for now and assume it will sort itself out.
  Another option would be to upvote one and downvote the other, to help speed the process up.
  
  Your last point might be interesting, but imagine if someone else is doing the opposite, you guys would be evening out ha ha
- I just follow them all, and get all the content. Big W

Don't sort by new? Top on a short time frame is probably a better choice
- This is top 6 hours.
- I sort by active and this is how my feed looks. Except I see the duplicates every 5-6 posts. But I see the same ~10 posts for maybe 100+ with a few non-duplicates sprinkled in. Same with sorting by hot.
  And then 24h later, it's the same feed, with the same duplicates.
  36h later and still maybe 1/2 are the same duplicates from 2 days prior.
  It's pretty bad, finding threads I'm interested in keeps getting harder and harder.
  
  Sort by top 6 hours
- I get the same thing with active or hot.
- Sorting by new or new comments does not usually result in seeing the same post across multiple instances all bunched together like this. This is what you'd see sorting by Hot or Active or just looking at your subscriptions when youre subscribed to multiple communities centered around the same topic.
  I have been sorting by New Comments since a week into using Lemmy and even though I am subscribed to multiple duplicate communities, I rarely if ever see two of the same exact posts side by side. Those I do tend to be posted by the same user in the same short amount of time.
  
  There is sorting by new posts and there is sorting by new comments. By comments is a lot more random/mixed

I feel like the same thing happened on reddit when you followed multiple similar communities, i.e. unions and iwwunions in this photo.
- Very much so. Reddit was crossposted to shit.
- I had an extension that collapsed reposts into one post. That feature is even more important on lemmy.

Seems like we could use federation on the community level
- Yes, exactly this. Using Reddit as an anology, each Subreddit should be it's own instance, rather than having duplicate subreddits across many instances.
  
  We would still have multiple instances/communities with the same name and intetest.
  
  I think that's more what the devs had in mind when they decided to make Lemmy federated. Each instance would be a little more distinct in the users it would attract (ideology, hobby, etc.), and federation would be more about exploring the local neighborhoods; maybe instances would even limit or ban user-created communities.
  In reality, most instances seem to be attracting similar users and making mini-reddits that can talk to each other. It's ended up more about simple load balancing and having backup communities accessible should you get cut off from your preferred one. You can still get out and explore the nearby neighborhoods, but they have the same Starbucks and MicroCenter that yours does. This still is useful in its own way, but it comes with different set of challenges, particularly for the front-end UI's.
  
  That's not really how the technology works. But a simple solution could be, both in kbin and lemmy, if the software could aggregate link posts that share the same canonical link URL and provide a summary for each community that's linked it. Then you'd see the link once, but could see the post from each community that's linked it rolled up underneath it.
  Kind of like how some RSS readers have a feature that will detect "hot links" in your feed and surface the link with access to the feed items below it rather than having the feed items scattered about.
  
  Yeah we need something like multireddits which have collections of communities across instances that can be subscribed to instead of the individual communities themselves. So your worldnews could be a single subscription of all the worldnews communities across lemmy.world, beehaw, etc. De-duping for extra credit!
- @DasRubberDuck Thew lack of community federation was super confused for me in the very beginning. Personally i think, communities would be the most important part to federate, cause that data would be lost otherwise if an instance goes down. I could live with loosing my account and my "connections" to other people but loosing all the information in all those communities would be horrible.

I agree, the cross-posting gets annoying. Why do people insist that everyone who is interested in a certain topic needs to participate in their post, so it has to go on every community?
People did not do that on reddit. They just made one post and waited for interaction.
- there were tons of cross posts on reddit, it's just that they usually weren't visible on the front page as such
  
  It's more that every sub had much different levels of activity so one repost would get attention while another dwindled.
  The issue with Lemmy is activity is not centralized so each individual repost sees roughly as much activity as the other, so as far as sorting goes, they're all considered to be as equally active, i.e. "Hot". It's all kind of flat line across communities.
  We just need more activity, more people, more voting, making making more posts.
  
  The cross posts on reddit were terrible.
  Same fucking post on awww, upliftingnews, mildlyinteresting, bustypetite, etc
  
  That was different, you'd more rarely see one individual cross-posting to tons of subs. Instead it would be many individuals cross-posting.
  That I do not have a problem with. 5 users starting 5 threads is different from 1 user starting 5 threads. Every cross-post is not equal.
- People did this constantly on Reddit, I don't know what you're talking about.
  
  I didn't see it very often at all. Unless you're talking about memes and repost bots or something.
  But when someone made some random post about their life or some story or question or something, they would just post it to one spot. Like 98% of the time.
- This is the natural effect of the core structure of this platform.
  And it's only going to get worse as the user base increases and instances start to defederate one another due to differences in acceptable content and conduct.
  I know saying anything the least bit critical of Lemmy means lots of downvotes, but the whole system seems far too prone to fragmentation and the repetition necessary to make up for it.
  The whole appeal of Reddit was that it was a one stop shop for key discussion on the topics you were interested in. No matter how many similar communities popped up there was usually one subreddit that was the spot for a topic, and other similar ones were only viable if they focused on a specific niche. Here, it's completely possible that there might be 20 communities on exactly the same subject that have 90% of their content overlapping...and you have to be subscribed to all of them if you want the extra 10% of unique stuff they bring to the table.
  
  The dream was that each instance would bring something different so the collective would be a mosaic of unique(ish) communities
  The reality is that each community is an overlapping subset of the communities defined by the social sites like Reddit, going all the way back to Usenet groups
  
  I mean, the core is no different. You can make communities here, you can make communities there. There was nothing stopping you from making duplicates there, and many people did.
  I think this is really just a sign of Lemmy's early status, and people's perception of it is more of an illusion that'll change with time. It's really just that we don't have any actual large communities yet. Whatsoever.

Wef err Voyager has a thing that will block things that you have already looked at.
That might help

@cyu@sh.itjust.works stop cross-posting to the same communities, there's no karma!
- Not sure if tagging is a thing 🤷
- @kresten@feddit.dk did it work?
  
  I think it did actually. One of these most be from the ping, and the other must be from replying to my comment. It's probably a bug tho.
  Can you confirm that you also receive double notifications, @Historical_General@lemmy.world ?

This bugs me too. There are various GitHub issues about grouping communities. As far as I know, no one has gotten to 'em yet.

I just block the accounts that do this. Make it much nicer to browse 👌

Give it some time my dude. Devs are working to fix these issues. Eventually we will get there

Yeah, missing active various support communities.

Yeah, I made a filter for the canvas and a bunch of other things. That's hella annoying. Feels exactly as Reddit, but now I can filter it

I only subscribe to the usually most popular community in a subject I’m interested in for this reason
- It's stopping people from subbing to different communities which is probably a bad thing.
  
  Probably, but until a solution is found it only mâles lemmy a mess and imo that’s worse

Top 6 hours or top 12 hours seems to have a better range of options. Try those.
- This is top 6 hours
  
  That's bizarre, it's never looked like that for me.

Agreed, this issue really kills the fun of browsing.

beeper spotted
- Great app that lets me participate in the forced WhatsApp groups without having meta garbage on my phone! Love it.

The Hot algorithm is so broken lol

There was talk about the ability to link communities in the future, so that dupes show up as merged. No idea what happened of that.
- There is no point to linking communities- if they are going to have identical content, just pick one or the other.
  A better option would be for cross posts (using the Lemmy cross post feature) to exist as a single entity that is visible in multiple communities. This would allow for some differences in moderation which is the justifiable reason for multiple communities on the same topic in the first place.

You already know the drill. Either block unneeded ones or subscribe the needed ones and browse the subscribed feed instead

Then decide for one unions community to follow.

My instance also allows porn, so I see the exact same porn photo/clip at least 10 times minimum while I'm scrolling.
I recall seeing a Lemmy app that is working on grouping these similar posts, but I can't remember which app it was. Either way, that feature needs to become widespread. I'm so tired of seeing the same stuff on repeat.

Well maybe if you'd block that furry shit you could at least feel better about it.

155 comments