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.
Two reasons:
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There are many steps between “I never wish to see any unmoderated content ever again” and “I wish to see unmoderated content in my feed every day”. I don’t want to block Lemmy.world communities but I also will go insane if I read those comments every day.
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I can’t know what those communities are in advance of their being inserted. I don’t want the default option for content in my main feed to be “opt out”.
If you will, allow me to attempt a friendly rebuttal?
You aren’t on PieFed right now anyway? So maybe you mean that this is a reason to not join it? “Soon” the Thunder app will officially support PieFed and that will offer additional options for an interface.
A new feature just dropped where you click on the words and it takes you to the original community. Yes, I mean that the new feature was added to the new feature, just in the time that we’ve been having this conversation, started 13 hours ago on this post from 21 hours ago. THIS is the pace of development of PieFed, compared to Lemmy. I’m not suggesting that you not offer feedback - conversely, I’m saying that there is a VERY high chance that it will be heard, considered, and possibly implemented all within the space of mere days.
For instance I’d love to see an option to skip past one comment section to the next one, for situations like this. That way you could read “some but not all” of such comments, from such communities as you do not enjoy as much as other communities, but not have a hard time moving on to the next.
Everything is optional here: when you click on a post it shows up as the “main”/OP, and then other cross-posts are indicated, and their comments appended to the END of that conversation thread. Therefore you can read all the OC’s comments and then simply stop before reading the next ones from other communities. But yeah, this could definitely be improved & streamlined as mentioned above.
To your first point, Lemmy offers very few to no options to implement that ideology - you either are subscribed to something or you are not (unless you are willing to brave looking at All, which I did but those who do definitely seem to be in the tiny minority, to the point of being made fun of to admit it, sadly). PieFed offers many, Many, MANY choices in-between, for posts, and so it would very much be in the same spirit to add some additional options as you alluded to regarding comments. Perhaps “only show top comments (rather than all)”, maybe even an exact (edit: I meant to add “user customizable” here) limiting threshold specified like first 20 comments, using whatever sorting method (Hot/New/etc.). Of course, someone would have to do that work to make it happen! PieFed being written in Python rather than the super difficult and unfinished language Rust makes that much easier, i.e. far more people are capable of such, if only they are willing! Perhaps you’ll add it even:-). If not, then it’s still great that you are offering suggestions:-).
But this is a very new feature, and yeah it’ll take time to perfect. Your second topic seems a tiny little bit to go against the spirit of your first, where you didn’t want content to be opt-out, yet you also wanted to be exposed to new things that are in-between never see it vs. always see it. It will take time to discover the UX needs and then implement it in a UI. I hope my suggestions above help the devs a little to explore that - like top 20 comments rather than “all the comments” vs. “none of the comments”.
Don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Piefed overall. I think you misunderstood my second point a little, I don’t want to be “exposed to new things” in my social media per-se, I want to read my chosen subscriptions (with my chosen social groups) and move on.
I see the “issue” of “divided” communities coming up a lot. But to me, the variety of perspectives and moderation styles on the same topic is a major benefit of the Fediverse (to the point I might describe it as its greatest strength) especially when it come to non-technical or social topics like politics. For example Lemmy.ca users are going to have very different perspectives about US politics than Lemmy.us (hypothetically). I’m not sure that it benefits those users to centralize the discussion (not saying that’s what’s happening exactly but it is something I see come up a lot).
I guess what I didn’t get is: doesn’t this new feature purely add, not detract, from someone’s capabilities?
So like, if you strictly wanted to read just the comments from the original community, then you could just stop at the gap where those comments end and the comments from another community begin - unless you are worried about FOMO due to seeing them and then feeling compelled to have to read them (all)?
Or if you wanted to read only let’s say half of the communities (but then all of the comments from each of those), then you can still do that? And now there are even two ways: to use the old method of accessing the cross-post menu and going to each community individually to read those, or the new way to hop and skip and jump all on just one page (this one admittedly isn’t so ideal just yet, without the ability to simply skip down to the next).
So, except for perhaps FOMO, what is being lost here? And isn’t this pretty niche, since someone can always just block the “bad” communities and never have to see them again, so that the difficulty here lies in both preserving them to show some but neither all nor none of them? That seems a more nuanced thing that isn’t likely to just spring up out of nowhere, as this initial feature did.
Well, it’s not like I’m even disagreeing with you there. Your suggestion does sound nice, and would be helpful to have.
Although I will say that I disagree that it will necessarily cause centralization of comments, or at least not entirely. For one thing you can respond to any comment, so this only affects top-level comments, and for another, subscriptions have those different implications on PieFed than on Lemmy, so e.g. I often do NOT subscribe to Lemmy.world communities such as politics or news, since that way they do not show up in my Subscribed feed - hence, all my top-level replies will be definition not be located there - and yet I can still see posts from these communities in the Topic/Feeds if I desire, and now I can also see comments from them.
Perhaps I’m just being a pendant - or I felt more like we were “exploring this space” verbally:-) - where what you are saying isn’t “necessarily” a given, and yet indeed this may encourage certain pre-existing trends, especially for those who aren’t forewarned or forearmed to resist them. And yet we still haven’t arrived so much at a (potential) “solution”, except to simply turn off the feature at the instance level, which will still allow those pre-existing trends to continue as they were, while also not helping with all the new things this offers such as helping people discover new communities, e.g. outside of Lemmy.world, that they probably had no idea even existed:-). i.e. yes there is a cost to this new feature, but there are also costs to not having it as well. And the costs to me seem small - bc again, someone can simply ignore all of these extra comments (except for FOMO?) and stop reading after the primary set, while if this feature did not exist then it would take a lot more time having to hunt through and read all of the comments from each community individually - which I used to do, which is why I’m saying that I LOVE this new feature!:-) But… maybe an option to disable it offered per user account would be sufficient to help improve it for you? If you can pin down something that doesn’t take a lot of effort, you could submit a feature request for that?
