I commonly browse all by new, and I block users who crosspost any given article to more than one other community. To me it’s almost always a sign that they actually don’t care about the topic or contents, but instead their own post count and user recognition.
Lemmy really needs to have some sort of built-in mechanism for grouping cross posts like this, because it does look spammy in the feed.
The users doing the cross posting aren’t doing anything differently than they’d do by posting a link to multiple subreddits. It’s just that there’s no sorting algorithm on Lemmy, so there’s no “smart” filtering happening behind the scenes to keep it from looking as cluttered.
I do think part of the problem is that people are treating this like Reddit. A quantity versus quality, shotgun approach to populating communities. It’s just uncurated noise.
True, but I feel like that’s a necessary evil in order to encourage growth in the platform. There’s gotta be something for people to see when they visit, otherwise they stop coming. And social platforms don’t really work if people aren’t being social on it.
Some may argue that this is actually a good thing and that it keeps uninterested users off the platform in the first place, but I feel like that’s putting the cart before the horse, because users need a reason to be interested in the first place.
It’s a little forced, to be sure, but I think that’s just got to be part of our growing pains for a bit until the community at large is a bit more fleshed out and certain posting conventions are established. A lot of things are also going to be changing pretty rapidly, since Lemmy is still in pretty active development, and the rush of new users has jolted that development recently, too. So there will be new features and a new culture to adopt to eventually.
Given that federation naturally leads to fragmented communities it’s expected that there will be some portion of users who subscribe to only one instance of a community and so would benefit from cross-posts. I don’t think it’s necessarily conceited on the poster’s part to cross-post content that they think would be of interest to multiple versions of the same community on different lemmy instances.
Likewise it’s also natural that another portion of users will subscribe to every version of a community across all instances so that they don’t miss anything. In that case lemmy-ui needs to be able to consolidate duplicate posts across instances, and cross-posts are the natural linking mechanism for doing that. Cross-posting actually helps (or could help) lemmy to build feeds that don’t contain a bunch of duplicate articles - something which I see a lot of. I’m not sure if it’s a feature of lemmy-ui already, but it certainly could be.
Unpopular opinion confirmed. Unless you’re talking about cross-posting to multiple unrelated communities, in which case I agree.
what? you mean to say you don’t like having the same post appear 4 times in a row in your feed?!
shocking.
I always feel a bit weird about crossposting myself for this reason. I do it mainly with the hope that more people will see the community I posted from, or to add something to a community that I want to see grow. But I don’t think I ever posted something to more than three communities, and everything I’ve posted so far had been made by me.
