Comment on An alternative perspective on Alien.top and the Fediverser project
canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Eliminate all bots.
Crossposts are useless because the communities are not interactive.
The strength of the Lemmy community in my opinion is the high quality of discussion, and there is no discussion to be had on reddit reposts when we are not having our content reposted onto reddit.
agreed. the only useful bot here imo is autotldr, which could just be integrated into Lemmy itself, and having it be a bot is just a temporary compromise.
It would be nice imo if an extension system was added to Lemmy just like browsers. Autotldr, Wikipedia summarisers, remindme, video downloaders, etc could be handled like a client side extension instead of being bots. They’d work completely fine, and not clutter up everyone’s feed the way
Crossposts are useless because the communities are not interactive.
That is simply not true. Even if you put aside that most people are lurkers first, mirrored posts work as a way to bootstrap conversation between real people.
There is also value in mirroring content simply because it makes it searchable and indexable in the Fediverse, away from Reddit control.
But it doesn’t bootstrap conversation properly, because some OP on an entire other website is asking for help, and we’re talking to brick walls.
Lemmy is more helpful for Linux help than reddit is anyways, because on reddit they’ll tell you to fuck off and search, while on Lemmy I can still get hands-on support with a willing community.
That’s still useful. I found myself lurking a ton of subreddits recently looking for buildapcsales or laptopdeals. Then once I bought them I started lurking threads for people who had similar problems as me setting it up. I still find myself adding Reddit to the front of my Google searches when I want responses or reviews from real people about stuff. I even had to reinstall the Reddit app at some point to look at something, which was annoying, but I wanted the info. I wish I could do that with Lemmy instead.
Thank you for your comment
we’re talking to brick walls.
Two-way communication is on the way. The main issue I am facing it needs to be done in a way that gets approval from the Lemmy user and I still figuring out if I should do this flow from the fediverser instance or from the “general” fediverser.network site.
Until this is not solved, I can tell you that any response that I have to a Reddit user, I respond on Lemmy and I trigger a script that sends the message to Reddit as well. (Example.)
I’ve also have sent tens if not hundreds of DMs to people on Reddit with a link to corresponding Lemmy thread, telling them about how they can join and even to participate. Not all of them respond of course, but the positive response rate is surprisingly higher than I expected.
The example here is impressive
While we're at it: crossposts in general should go or he handled differently. The way things are, crossposts will create new posts with new comment sections like reddit did. Yet
a) if something is of interest to two communities, chances are, ppl who are interested are already in those two communities, so crossposts will only clutter their feed
b) it splits up the discussion unnecessarily
Why not have corrsposts as mere.links to the original post so everybody can join in? The way things are, each crosspost will turn into a circle jerk of all the same arguments regurgitated by different people in different communities.
#Kbin actually handles this really well. Whenever it detects 2 of the same #thread (at least that's how I think it works), it'll group them and only show one of the threads on your feed. If you click on it, right under the thread will be the other #cross-posted threads on other magazines, each of which has its own upvote/downvote and comment count. You can click on any of those threads to switch to a certain magazine's thread and see the #comments there. Also, when you comment, it only goes to the thread you currently have open.
Lemmy does the latter part as well. You just have a chance to see multiple as well on the frontpage if you’re subscribed to both communities
Yeah, I just wanted to specify it isn't a mass comment kind of thing.
Interesting, thanks.
Kbin/Mbin seems more and more promising, that’s good
That’s the problem with federation though, you have 20 servers with 20 communities of the same thing, and there’s not many people redirecting and curating, because everybody wants to be a powermod. When we had the reddit migration it started a chain reaction nightmare of creating an infinite number of dead, useless, redundant communities. I like to use sports as a good example. Fanaticus.social is designed to be the premiere sports instance, yet all the local instances, like .ca or midwest.social, also will have their requisite team pages.
Perhaps instead of mirrors to reddit, we should be working on linking those communities together.
It’s happening already. You can see a few communities emerging as “the ones” on their topic
#Kbin has a #feature to kind of deal with this called #collections. Instead of subscribing to all #magazines of a same type or even name, you can put them in a collection (or find a collection where somebody already did that) and then favorite that collection see all of those magazines in your feed. Splitting up the discussion is still not ideal but at least this lets you see all of it at once and increases #discoverability.
I wish everything was a bit more standardized between kbin/mbin/Lemmy. It feels like we have these forks of the project that do different things because they emulate different behaviors of other sites, and reaching parity seems difficult without a lot of developer discussion.
I like a few things about kbin but for a while it was the instance causing the most spam on my feed because federated mod actions broke and spam cleaned up locally would not get cleaned on other instances. I saw Ernest back posting again so I guess development has resumed and some of those issues have been banged out.
Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
That makes sense.
If in the near future the communication would be both ways, what would you think of the tool?
canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I think it only serves to continue to keep reddit afloat. If our stuff does get crossposted, then we’re effectively just still using reddit. The point was to leave the platform because of the leadership, not kinda continue to half use it by proxy.
It’s a bandage that needs to be ripped off, not re-applied.
Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
First of all, thanks for your comment, I appreciate the discussion.
To answer your point, I’m not so sure, there are more spectrums and gradations than clear-cut groups.
I’m probably against the grain here, but I still see some quality content on Reddit among the thrash.
And when I tell those people who post interesting content why they don’t come to Lemmy, they explain that they don’t have the time to post everything twice, and even if Reddit is bad, it’s still where most of the people are.
registrert@lemmy.sambands.net 11 months ago
Then why not lurk at reddit for reddit content if it’s not about interacting with the community?
It would be a nightmare, there’s a clear difference between the people that have joined Lemmy because they wanted, those who joined Lemmy because Reddit became shit and those still on Reddit. I don’t want to interact with those still on reddit, if I did I’d simply stay on reddit.
Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Because people might want to have a look at a platform before considering moving to it, and they would consider it because they wouldn’t be afraid of missing out on their usual content.
I’m not so sure, there are more spectrums and gradations than clear-cut groups.
I’m probably against the salt here, but I still see some quality content on Reddit among the thrash. When I tell those people who post interesting content why they don’t come to Lemmy, they explain that they don’t have the time to post everything twice, and even if Reddit is bad, it’s still where most of the people are.
It’s probably this people that Fediverser is targeting.
registrert@lemmy.sambands.net 11 months ago
I’m confused about the difference between a lurker and someone requiring an account, yet don’t want to interact with the community. Why can’t people who leave a platform and create a new identity “lurk”/browse the old place for content, no matter if leaving reddit or lemmy?
You’re right in the way that it’s subjective - your perspective is as valid as mine. My own preferences still stand, I don’t want to interact with current reddit regulars.