cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/538685
No more duplicate posts
One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from linux@lemmy.world, linux@programming.dev, linux@lemmy.ml, etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it’s a bit less obvious because there’s a wider range of subjects involved.
Except now, it doesn’t, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.
We’re still figuring out whether it’s a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It’s a tricky UX and social question.
I’ve held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it’ll be added soon.
What happens if a thread is crossposted into another community that your instance knows about, but which you are not subscribed to?
I think it would be good to only display comments from communities you are already subscribed.
That’s not really how PieFed works - it takes awhile to adjust, but having a separate Subscribed feed from the Topics areas can be quite useful, allowing you to have your cake and eat it too. e.g. you could not subscribe to any Politics communities, but then if you rarely wanted to catch up, everything would be visible in a News & Politics feed.
So I’d rather see an option to control that, rather than work according to the “Lemmy” style.
Fwiw, I do note that comments do not show up from instances that you have actively blocked, and therefore presumably from communities that you have blocked as well.
We are talking about a feature that makes it easier to view comments, so general concerns about the feed concept aside (I find it a bad idea), it seems like forcing people to block communities so that their comments are not inserted into threads they are otherwise interested in seems counterproductive. It would be better to only show comments from communities that the user has actively subscribed to before.
Like for example I might be interested in the discussions happening on politics@instance.world, but the comments in threads at politics@instance.ml is something I would rather avoid. So this feature would force me to block politics@instance.ml which is the opposite of making it easier to read the comments from communities I am actually interested in.
It sounds like the current issue depends on what you think of having “subscribed” to content. So, I’m digressing here to talk about it first.
On Lemmy, there’s only the Local, Subscribed, and All feeds - that’s it, no more options available. And Local is virtually useless for someone who isn’t on a highly active generalized instance (like Lemmy.world) or else a very active special purpose one (like slrpnk.net or startrek.website, although even the latter would not offer the extremely active !tenforward@lemmy.world community). So for many of us, e.g. my alt account on discuss.online, and probably still most of the time for you on srlpnk.net, Local just doesn’t cut it.
While All has… issues. People report anime spam (unless you are on an instance that doesn’t federate?) and porn (this is unfair imho bc it depends on one’s NSFW setting, so gigo - Lemmy I feel like is extremely respectful of this setting), and ofc so many political and news and USA focused content. So the model is to block things that you don’t want, bc otherwise it makes All virtually unbearable to try to use. Like for me, I blocked all sports, any specific location (cities, states/provinces, nations, etc.), and other stuff that I knew for certain that I didn’t want (edit: which btw I felt was unfortunate, bc I actually would have liked to keep tabs on things happening around the world, even in places that I have never and will never visit, yet I HAD to find SOME way to reduce the flood of content on All, by focusing it a bit). And the majority of the time I browsed All actually. (Edit: one reason why is that less popular communities, such as poetry, have little chance of showing up in your Subscribed feed, so browsing All by New shows so much that Subscribed just won’t really offer, especially by Hot or Active)
But from the downvotes I often got whenever I said so, I see that the majority of people browse Subscribed (and dislike any other way that may work for others?🤪). This requires knowing about a community in order to add it, so e.g. if a community were to move, you might never know unless the mod allowed a post to state that fact (tenforward is a great example of that), and possibly not even then if you missed that post (even if it was pinned, you’d have to go there, and even then many sorting options won’t show it, like Top Six Hours).
So for Lemmy, “subscribing” means an ENORMOUS deal, basically to the point that you either see such content or else you are unlikely to ever see it - short of visiting an individual community explicitly to check it out (which I also often did:-).
But in PieFed it does not mean that at all. The model here has so many different options to expand one’s capabilities. Here, “subscribing” merely means for content to show up in the “Subscribed” main feed, but since there are multiple other avenues to be directed to content, it doesn’t have the enormous implications that subscriptions do on Lemmy. For example, if I was mod of a community or wanted to be alerted to every single post made in a community (usually those with low-volume content 😁), I can click one button to receive automated Notification alerts for that. And there’s also the default Topics as well as the user-customizable and also shareable Feeds. As well as, ofc the Subscription default main feed. But bc there’s so many more options, someone could, for instance, not subscribe to political communities or others like !askusa@discuss.online, if you wanted a reduced amount of USA-related content. And yet, that content is still accessible, bc you haven’t quite blocked it, merely not subscribed to it.
I think more choices = better. Ngl it took me over a week (maybe more) to get used to this new model, during which time I often reverted back to checking stuff on a Lemmy instance. But when I finally had it arranged how I wanted, now I REALLY appreciate these additional options!
And I don’t have any comments from anyone on Lemmy.ml showing up for me - bc I’ve blocked all users from that instance. Lemmy’s instance blocking is misnamed and nonfunctional as it does not actually “block” the “instance” as it says, but PieFed’s “block all users from <this instance>” works exactly as advertised!
Sorry this is long, but I hope offers that insider’s perspective of how PieFed works differently, bc it offers MANY different choices and options that are not available to people using Lemmy, which affects the implications of certain words like “blocking” (becoming true blocking) and “subscribe”/join (meaning merely to show up in the default Subscribed feed, but no other implications beyond that).
Good point, yep.
On the other hand it would also help people find communities they are interested in but haven’t subscribed to yet.
I am not against showing cross-post links like Lemmy currently does. That helps finding communities that you have not subscribed to yet (but are already known to your instance). But automatically loading all the comments as well seems a bit too much to me.
(+ @rimu@piefed.social) If you could easily skip past a section to the next block, that seems like it would help alleviate that concern? It’s still an extra click, but would make navigation easier?