Piefed has feeds now!
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No, the problem is that people that have no relation to the community start commenting and getting into arguments.
Say for example a /c/anarchism gets added to a "politics" feed. And suddenly you have a bunch of people that have no clue (or even a pretty false idea) commenting on posts in the anarchism community because they think it is just another politics posts. Then others that are actual members of that community start getting into largely off-topic arguments with these commenters and when moderators step in you shortly after get complaints from people about being "censored for their totally valid opinion about politics" and so on.
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More like reply to posts without regard for its host community. In other words, context collapse where the community is the main context.
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Wouldnt each post still indicate what community its on though?
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The whole point of lemmy is decentralization. Not being run off by bad mods. I agree that a lot of big instances have rude admins and mods but this idea is for similar communities with similar modding. If the mods agree then what’s the issue? A lot of big instances communities have the exact same mods anyways.
An example for my use case is I want to support slrpnk and post on their selfhosting com but I don’t want only 1 answer. Federating my post to all three big selfhosting communities would allow more interaction while still being decentralized in the sense of not instance dependent.
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An example for my use case is I want to support slrpnk and post on their selfhosting com but I don’t want only 1 answer. Federating my post to all three big selfhosting communities would allow more interaction while still being decentralized in the sense of not instance dependent.
Stick to one community. Assess pros and cons of similar communities and choose one. Create meta posts to discuss the choice with other members.
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This is huge. Thank you to everyone involved.
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It's more about users not giving a damn which can already be seen with users using 'all' feed downvoting or responding with unfitting comments to things that they should have just ignored but didn't because it showed up to them.
If the user visits feed expecting specific content just like they'd expect from community and treat it as such there's a good chance they'd contribute but not in positive way.
The feature is in a testing phase to find bugs and collect ideas and will be improved with time so such problems would hopefully be minimised. In which direction will the feature progress is something I don't know and from my understanding the devs don't fully know either but they're definitely interested in allowing more control over things like community opting out (or in?) from a specific feeds as a second option besides opting out from the feature completely. In what form the mods will have the tools to control to which feeds their communities belong I don't know but there's a lot of interest in it.
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That's a valid concern. And I think to solve that in a clean way and altogether, they need some options to restrict commenting or voting to subscribers only. Meddling with other features and how communities can be found, so people can keep hiding in Lemmy's noise... is a very indirect approach and doesn't go all the way.
I've seen a bit of that issue in connection with the All-feed. Back when AI was still largely hated on, we regularly had some amount of downvotes creep into the few dedicated AI communities. And while I support people downvoting the flood of AI related stuff in general news and technology communities, I don't see any reason to drive-by downvote an AI post in an AI community. But that has stopped since. And I don't think I've seen anyone come in and pick fights or something. It was just some minor but constant stream of downvotes.
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restrict commenting or voting to subscribers only.
Feeds subscribe you to those communities. Maybe if the feature didn't do that it would make more sense but with the current way things work it would require a different solution. Personally I strongly believe in granular control over to which feeds the community gets added with default opt-in where mods can react if something unwanted starts happening.
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Feeds subscribe you to those communities
I mean if you click on subscribe, to subscribe to all the communities within, that's kind of intended behaviour?! If you just view it, it shouldn't really be an issue. I guess there is some way to figure this out in an acceptable way.
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How'd you follow a feed to regularly visit if not without subscribing to it? The person you responded to complained that communities may get unwanted traffic if they were included in bad feeds. So while you suggested subscribers only comments and it would work for 'all' feed to filter out low effort trolls it wouldn't work with feeds where they are already subscribed to it.
Just like with communities where you don't look them up each time you want to see their content and you subscribe to them to have them easily accessible on you subscribed list or in subscribed feed the same would go for feeds.
I may have missed your subtle suggestion somewhere about changing the behavior of feeds in which case the feature would check out although that would cause some friction still when it comes to ease of interaction.
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Hmmh. And I've missed another point. If you want to do things like add communities later on, and this somehow propagates to existing subscribers, this can't work together with anything but one subscription per whole feed.
I haven't made complete sense of the feature and the consequences yet. I thought I'd just open the feed from the top bar and use it to categorize stuff for myself. But yeah, that's not the main point of it. I'm probably just very tired, I'll stop talking for today because what I say doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. Wish you all a nice day or night or whatever it is.
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I disagree. Especially on coms where one needs answers. But I want to support smaller instances.
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Maybe I worded it poorly, I know I can still do my thing, but I’m explaining why I would never use this unless it excluded certain instances.
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I missed this at first as well, but the "Create a Feed" button (colored almost the same as the background for some odd reason, using the PieFed theme) is accessible to you as a user, not simply an admin. So if you wanted let's say [email protected] and [email protected] but not [email protected], then you could do that. You probably should name it something appropriate like technology2, but mainly I mean that you are not limited to Feeds created by other people: the whole point of this is that now you can create your own (if you want to that is, or perhaps someone will have already done so).
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Ironically, if Lemmy supported decentralization of communities in this way as PieFed now does, and as I guess Reddit did iirc, then you could post to a smaller community and people who were subscribed to such a multi-community feed would be able to see it.
However, there are many features of Lemmy that are even (far) more authoritian in nature than Reddit. Lacking both a modmail and hiding the account name of the mod who removed something of yours, plus not sending you any notification about the event, are three such examples, and there are many more where that came from.
On Lemmy, as on Reddit, a mod "owns" their community, and that's all there is to it - there is no decentralization inherent in the system, at least at the community level. Where the decentralization comes from is the ability to pack up and move elsewhere if needed. Or course, you would be able to take none of it with you, nor be able to leave a message at the old place that you had migrated. As you see, decentralization, while nowhere close to a "myth", is quite constrained - mainly I mean, that functionality is available to admins, more than mods. So nobody can tell you what to do with the communities on your personal machine, running the Lemmy software, which is open source.
Although PieFed allows for greater levels of decentralization in numerous ways, chiefly with the Topics and now the ability for users to create their own custom ones.
Although a caveat is that "cross-posts" - even those sharing identical URLs - between multiple communities are not collapsed in the listing of posts in a feed (yet, although as Rimu said it's a high priority to add that).
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If I understand correctly that existing feeds can be altered later by the creator, then this is still quite an improvement over the old way that required potentially more limiting admin support. By allowing for such "mods" of not a community but rather of these feeds (again, rather than concentrating the authority solely in the hands of a full admin), it democratizes the process overall. Tbf not very well, but a little bit, and that's not nothing.
And if only a tiny change was made to more easily list out the full set of communities present in a feed (the copy button didn't seem to do that for me, but maybe it could become like a meta-sidebar feature), then it would democratize it still further to allow any user to see what communities are in those feeds - even those lacking a PieFed account, who simply wants to subscribe to those same ones while remaining on their existing Lemmy account?
Anyway, it's a step forward, however small or large, and that's worth acknowledging, woo-hoo! 🥳
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Thanks for taking the time to write this! This is well written and you make some excellent points.
Hiding mod accounts names is a weird choice and not notifying bans if even odder. Wonder the intention?
You make a great point with feeds! I didn’t consider that.
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One REALLY super nice feature of PieFed is that the sidebar text is shown underneath EVERY single post. Lemmy does not do that, and especially some apps almost look like they are doing their best to outright hide that information for some reason, putting it many clicks away!?
Imagine seeing a post on All, and knowing what the exact and entire set of rules are, prior to posting (including a reply to a post, as you said a drive-by).
To be fair, someone does have to scroll down to see it. But at least it's right there on the same page, not some whole other page entirely and buried many clicks away besides (going back and forth to writing a message that way, checking specific acronyms in the sidebar area, can get really annoying that way! in those apps that do it that way I mean, while in a browser you basically would need to open up a new tab, one for the post and a separate one for the community).
At least this seems like it would help reduce such effects? Maybe? Alternately, these feeds are basically like meta-communities themselves, created (and maintained?) by a "moderator", so perhaps if someone did not want their community included (which seems to run counter to how many communities would want to increase rather than decrease their discoverability), they could write to the "mod" to ask that it be removed?
Alternately, perhaps communities themselves should have a "private" setting. Lemmy already has a "local-only" setting along those lines. I remember that Reddit has a bunch of opt-in features regarding discoverability, but all of this in both Lemmy and PieFed is extremely primitive in comparison. At least PieFed is moving quickly with adding new features, so for it even if not for Lemmy, there is a strong hope to see all of this that we are talking about!:-)
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You'll need to make a compromise between supporting the smaller instances or getting the wider audience.
Crossposting to both doesn't help the small instance, most people will keep replying on the larger one
