Piefed has feeds now!
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I disagree. Especially on coms where one needs answers. But I want to support smaller instances.
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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Once a community is known to an instance it is available via the search feature. Thus this really doesn't improve discoverability at all assuming the person adding it to the feed is already using the instance.
What it however does is moving the conscious choice of looking for and joining a community to an opaque follow feed button that makes someone subscribe to a lot of communities they know nothing about other than that someone else thought they somehow fit to a single word tag (and it is worse than hashtags on Mastodon as it is not the person making the post that adds them, but a totally unrelated 3rd party).
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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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).
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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This will reduce the discourse quality significantly as it will bring in more drive-by comments from people not subscribed to the specific communities in question.
I hope there will be some way for communities to opt-out from this or maybe better require them to opt-in.
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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I disagree. Especially on coms where one needs answers. But I want to support smaller instances.
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
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For the federating its a new kind of AP actor. I'll be putting in a FEP for it in the near future, but its basically a "Group" that only cares about the "Following" collection.
You can see example json for the AP interactions here: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/activitypub_examples/feeds
The AP interactions for a Feed are:
- Send a Follow request for a Feed
- Accept a Follow request (this is automatic for public feeds)
- Reject a Follow request (this is automatic for private feeds)
- Announce an Add of a Community to a Feed
- Announce a Remove of a Community from a Feed
- Send a Delete of a Feed to subscribers
Hmm so the
Feedactor mainly consists of a following collection and uses Add/Remove activities. This really sounds like it should be aCollectionand not an actor. -
Yes having that option more easily accessible would be much apprechated.
Opened an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5458
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Oooooooh, love u.
Opened an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5458
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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!:-)
Communities want more discoverability to get more members that post relevant things. This does the opposite and actively hides the specific community from potential posters while increasing the noise in the comments.
I think people really need to have some serious thought about the consequences of what they are asking for. These feeds, similar to algorithmic recommendations of commercial social media, increase engagement (a dubious metric, primarily interesting for advertisers) but not discoverability.
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Communities want more discoverability to get more members that post relevant things. This does the opposite and actively hides the specific community from potential posters while increasing the noise in the comments.
I think people really need to have some serious thought about the consequences of what they are asking for. These feeds, similar to algorithmic recommendations of commercial social media, increase engagement (a dubious metric, primarily interesting for advertisers) but not discoverability.
That's some really distorted understanding of "discoverability" that you have in your head. Sorry for your loss.
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This is huge. Thank you to everyone involved.
Trying it right now, it's pretty sweet
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Yes, that is high on the agenda.
Is there a plan to implement the possibility of a downvote free experience? Kind of like an instance disabling downvotes does on native lemmy?
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That's some really distorted understanding of "discoverability" that you have in your head. Sorry for your loss.
Words have a meaning you know? "Discoverability" comes from "discover", which discribes an act of looking for something and not having something pushed into your field of view with minimal own effort.
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Trying it right now, it's pretty sweet
new blaze account?
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Words have a meaning you know? "Discoverability" comes from "discover", which discribes an act of looking for something and not having something pushed into your field of view with minimal own effort.
This is what I was referring to, your understanding is distorted because BOTH fall under the discoverability. You're bending the reality around you so that it fits your agenda ignoring literally anything that is said to you. The communities aren't forced upon you either as it's you choosing which feeds you follow the exact same way posts are added to a community you follow so they're not forced upon you buddy. Or what, should we get rid of communities as well? XDD Let's go back to microblogging where we can scream into the void that we can't navigate through due to almost nothing of organisation besides the tags maybe that can't even be moderated unlike communities/feeds. I guess we should get rid of the concept of tags too given your perspective on organisaton and discoverability of things you're interested in? Some of your points are valid but a lot of them are incoherent and ignore reality. Some of the suggestions are terrible for everyone out there too due to ignoring that reality. I'd work great if the world worked the way you perceive it through your mind.
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Communities want more discoverability to get more members that post relevant things. This does the opposite and actively hides the specific community from potential posters while increasing the noise in the comments.
I think people really need to have some serious thought about the consequences of what they are asking for. These feeds, similar to algorithmic recommendations of commercial social media, increase engagement (a dubious metric, primarily interesting for advertisers) but not discoverability.
In one sense this does nothing that other avenues don't already.
But I do start to see what you mean. Making communities available not just individually but en mass like this will encourage people to not read the side-bar text of each specific community, to see how e.g. its goals may not be aligned with all the other echo chambers and/or debate clubs present in the Fediverse, and instead start treating all communities within a feed as being equally the same.
A fact which PieFed worsens by not describing well the community name. e.g. you may read "c/Fediverse" - but what is that really? Several clicks away, possibly having to go all the way to the home instance in some cases where the short nickname doesn't match the longer one (and all the more so if there are spaces within the latter), you may find that it means something like [email protected] - but just reading "c/Fediverse" isn't enough to be able to tell that apart from some other c/Fediverse somewhere else.
Except you can, by simply clicking the post. Not on the feed page, but in the individual post, at the top you can see the full community name - e.g. this example shows Home -> Topics -> Fediverse -> [email protected].
And then as you scroll down, you can read the exact side-bar text, with all the explanation, rules, list of moderators, engagement stats, etc., like the one above begins with:
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's (sic) related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
And then further below that, a list of Related communities, which I'm not sure but perhaps those are the ones that define that Topic?
So all the information that I think you were wanting people to have access to is there, not on the Topic/Feed page themselves but rather on the individual posts.
Though you are probably right that it could increase more naive engagement, by people who don't read things. Still, this is a new feature that was not available before, and when even newer features continue to be added it will get better still, like if a setting could be added by a moderator of a community to indicate a desire for it not to be included in such multi-communities. Although even the latter may want to be not a hard cutoff and rather a double-check label - perhaps an example could be a community welcoming to trans people first and about technology second, so it should not be conjoined into a multi-community for technology feeds, yet it may be fine to combine it along with other trans communities? Also, if a particular user wants to make like 5 feeds for their own personal usage, and they have put in the effort to read about each one individually, then this feature is very useful for such a person.
Even while people may also use it naively as well, yes. On the other hand, there are fewer than 300 people that use PieFed (see stats), so the immediate effect likely will not be overwhelming, and there is time to add new features before PieFed becomes more mainstream.
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Is there a plan to implement the possibility of a downvote free experience? Kind of like an instance disabling downvotes does on native lemmy?
Yes, that's a setting that admins can choose for the entire instance. Also if downvotes are on then at the community level mods can choose whether to accept downvotes from members, the current instance, trusted instances or everywhere.
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I appreciate your words of caution. Remember this feature is very new and will no doubt get a lot more finesse added in future. There's no point building some baroque all singing-all-dancing perfect thing unless we're sure people will use it and by releasing earlier we get valuable feedback which determines whether we continue building that feature at all, etc.
Have you considered a UX similar to old reddit for this? where you hover over the join button with the mouse and it gives you the option to create a feed or add and remove to a feed?
I actually checked multiple times and could not find it (but admittedly maybe that is my mistake and not a real problem with discoverability).
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Have you considered a UX similar to old reddit for this? where you hover over the join button with the mouse and it gives you the option to create a feed or add and remove to a feed?
I actually checked multiple times and could not find it (but admittedly maybe that is my mistake and not a real problem with discoverability).
Interesting, thanks!
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Hmm so the
Feedactor mainly consists of a following collection and uses Add/Remove activities. This really sounds like it should be aCollectionand not an actor.Possibly. At the end of the day it's all just JSON.
Here is more detail - https://codeberg.org/JollyDevelopment/fep/src/branch/jollydev/fep-1d80/fep/1d80/fep-1d80.md
