I’m just getting familiar with lemmy fediverse and trying to make my way through it after getting out from reddit. I’m trying out liftoff app for android and I’m seeing way more double posts from different instances from same users. Same content from same users on multiple instances. I thought fediverse supposed to, You post in whatever instance you are and it’ll be shared among all instances. I’m more confused now.
Lemme explain with subreddits.
You have /r/tech and /r/technology, right? Different subreddits, different communities. Somebody posts something on /r/tech and crossposts it to /r/technology. You’re subscribed to both. You now see the same link twice.
That’s exactly what’s happening here, cross-posting to different communities. It’s still the wild west out here, but I would expect a lot of these communities to solidify behind 2-3 “winners” over time, with the smaller ones becoming more niche.
Missed opportunity to say “Lemmy explain”
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Thanks, please feel free to post anything you’d like explained, or the best “explains” on Lemmy.
Because everybody loves explaining things.
That makes sense. I totally understand lemmy is still in evolution phase. Let it grow and mature.
It hasn’t reached evolution just yet. It’s still a bunch of bacteria swirling around fighting for resources, slowly but surely taking the form of a proper ecosystem.
Let’s be completely frank: the place is a confusing, buggy mess that only a 3rd of users seem to fully understand. But it’s much less of one than it was last week. And much less than the week before that.
This is going to get better, it’s just going to take some time and patience from everyone.
Reddit wasn’t built in a day either. In fact, that famous migration from Digg took years.
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People are coming from Reddit where they posted to every relevant subreddit, and they’re doing the same here. It is unnecessary because of how the fediverse works, they’re just trying to maximize engagement.
I wouldn’t call it totally unnecessary. There’s are a lot of topics for which there are communities on multiple instances. Sure, you could just post in in the community with the most subscribers, but someone on another instance might have an answer for your question.
You can subscribe and post to communities on any instance, not just the one you are on. People are posting to every relevant community in order to make sure everyone who might want to see their content does see it. There is a built-in cross-posting feature that should make it so that it’s only in your feed once, but if they are manually posting to many communities instead of making a cross-post then you will see all of them if you are subscribed to all of those communities, or if you are browsing All.
Does the built-in cross-posting feature work like reddit—where it just alerts you to the existence of the other threads—or does it merge the threads into one conversation?
It just alerts you
Are you sure you’re not on All via Everything? Which would show the version retrieved by lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw etc as individual rows.
It was on All via Everything. So it shows same posts of different instances as different rows? Now I feel stupid. Sorry for wasting all your time really. Edit: But still I’m wondering why post same content on multiple instances.
Yes just like on All on reddit
I do not think this is what happens. At least not for me for the posts I checked. The double / triple posts I currently see on the “frontpage” are all posted in different Communities. The problem (at the moment?) ist that people of different instances create communities with basically the same topic. Like “tech” and “technologie”, both are on different instances. Or Games, Gaming or whatever. Now when you create a post, you have to decide in which community you create it. There is currently also no way to crosspost with a single post. So if you want to make sure that people of the tech and the technology community can see your post, you have to post in both communities. And since we now have 2 posts in different communities (also in different instances), they can pop up in the frontpage.
Currently I do not see that there is an easy solution for this. I understand that people are posting the same in different communities to reach the biggest amount of people. Personally I tried to subscribe to all communities that seem to be related and have some activity, but not everyone might do this. Also for newcomers it is not obvious that once you subscribed to let´s say gaming on Beehaw, that they also should subscribe to games on let´s say kbin, so they can read all of this.
As long as there is no way to link communities together or to crosspost (one post that is seen on different communities), I think we have to live with seeing either multiple posts of the same topic (each with their own discussions going on) or stop creating multiple posts, but live with the fast that not everyone interested in it can read it.
I suppose it’s a bit like the Wild West at the moment, with everyone figuring out the rules as we go along.
I suppose there are a few explanations for this, helped by the fact that it is very easy to share a post between instances and communities (it makes more sense with the latter where there is crossover, eg a band is playing at a festival and you post to the band community and then copy that to the festival community):
a) it’s just someone who doesn’t understand how instances work. A polite message would seem to be in order.
b) it’s someone using Lemmy to promote themselves or a product (either doing it by hand or possibly using some kind of bot). Everyone’s mileage might differ on this but, to me, that looks like spam and should probably be removed. I imagine when we have robust (any?) moderation bots that is the kind of thing that would ping up on their radar. For now, if you think it looks spammy, report it.
However, I haven’t seen any examples so can’t really go into more detail on that.
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You post from your instance, but the post will appear in the instance that hosts the community you posted to. I’m not seeing these duplicates, but I don’t use the app you’re using - I just use the web interface. Could you give an example of where you see this?
People are cross posting in any and all vaguely related communities to try and get traction. It’s a little annoying but it’s not too different from what people do on reddit all the time.
It might be the case that you see the federated version. Are there the same comments too? If yes it’s federated. If no it’s probably a duplicate or a broken federation
On reflection, I think this might be a good idea, at least to start with: The main rationale within the fediverse for having multiple communities on the same topic is if they have different approaches to moderation (like r/askHistorians vs r/askHistory on reddit). But before new communities have worked out those different approaches—and before users have become familiar with them—we’re all kind of going by trial and error.
If everyone just subscribed and posted to the biggest community and ignored the rest, we’d never get the chance to see which mod teams we prefer. But if we start out posting the same content everywhere, we have the best chance to compare how different communities treat it. Then we can stay subscribed to the communities with the best dynamics, and unsubscribe from the rest.
Might not be what you mean but, it seems to me the sharing among instances have significant delays.
That increases risk of users posting the same thing from different instances.
Crossposting is of course as much a thing as it was on reddit. If for instance both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml has a technology community, they are 2 separate communities, with each their moderators.
You can also subscribe to both separately.
You can post and comment to communities disregarding which lemmy server instance you are on, as long as they are federated.
É complicado mesmo…
