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!:-)
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.
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.
Possibly. (Subscribing to a feed does actually subscribe you to all the communities in the feed. So technically they are not drive-by comments by non-members. But I see what you mean.)
Discoverability is a huge huge problem with all federated platforms and this will significantly alleviate that.
If I don’t misunderstand then you can only add communities to these feeds that are already known to your instance, thus I don’t really see how this solves the federated discoverability issues which are ultimately due to instances not being aware of each other at all.
The feed creator needs to know about the communities so they can type/paste the community address in, yeah. This feature takes the expert fediverse landscape knowledge contained in the heads of the terminally online and makes it available to more casual/new users.
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! 🥳🎉
Subscribing to the feed subscribes to communities in them = federation solved.
On top of that the content is over there organised for you which is not something you otherwise have. You have discoverability solved in 2 ways. If someone has a good feed and you see a cool community missing you can message the owner for them to add it building the collection as a community.
c/all is worse imo and with feeds you will at least have control over picking topics you’re interested in unlike c/all. We should be focusing on opting out from c/all more as it causes far more damage and it’s been that way for a long time unlike feeds on such a small platform that just got the feature implemented.
Also the opt-in would be a great way to KILL the entire feature that’s been the most hyped up and requested feature across the entire threadiverse. BRUH
Imagine having all communities opted out from c/all by default. That would be stupid and make everything hard to access.
Opt-out on the other hand for public feeds specifically is something that I support. But then good luck having that supported on lemmy where almost all communities exist.
E: c/all is just one monolithic feed forced on all users for better perspective about the issue. With custom feeds much like with communities you pick out your interests and follow them specifically and it’s all optional. I don’t see how it could cause more damage than this.
Opt-out on the other hand for public feeds specifically is something that I support. But then good luck having that supported on lemmy where almost all communities exist.
Lemmy already has a setting community.hidden so that communities dont show up on the All feed. But this is not easy to access at the moment. I can fix that.
Yes the All feed has the same problem, but posts need to be significantly more popular for them to even register in the All feed. Thus most small communities currently fly under the radar of the All feed, and if they do get a popular post it nearly always becomes a moderation nightmare.
Hashtags on Mastodon have a similar problem, having given rise to the universally dreaded “reply guy” issue.
I think most people on Lemmy haven’t really thought this through and what the implications of such a feature are once it becomes widely used.
And no, the one that is doing the opt-in is the person creating the feed without asking the community that is being forcefully opted-in. Giving them the option to veto that is better than having them realize that they have been opted into something they don’t agree with by being flooded with trolls and off-topic comments.
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. It’s very bare-bones at the moment.
No, the problem is that people that have no relation to the community start commenting and getting into arguments.
Say for example a /c/anarchism gets added to a “politics” feed. And suddenly you have a bunch of people that have no clue (or even a pretty false idea) commenting on posts in the anarchism community because they think it is just another politics posts. Then others that are actual members of that community start getting into largely off-topic arguments with these commenters and when moderators step in you shortly after get complaints from people about being “censored for their totally valid opinion about politics” and so on.
That’s a valid concern. And I think to solve that in a clean way and altogether, they need some options to restrict commenting or voting to subscribers only. Meddling with other features and how communities can be found, so people can keep hiding in Lemmy’s noise… is a very indirect approach and doesn’t go all the way.
I’ve seen a bit of that issue in connection with the All-feed. Back when AI was still largely hated on, we regularly had some amount of downvotes creep into the few dedicated AI communities. And while I support people downvoting the flood of AI related stuff in general news and technology communities, I don’t see any reason to drive-by downvote an AI post in an AI community. But that has stopped since. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone come in and pick fights or something. It was just some minor but noticeable and constant stream of downvotes. So I can definitely see how these things would be annoying to some people. On the other hand I think people wanting to subscribe to things and having curated feeds, might also be a valid request.
restrict commenting or voting to subscribers only.
Feeds subscribe you to those communities. Maybe if the feature didn’t do that it would make more sense but with the current way things work it would require a different solution. Personally I strongly believe in granular control over to which feeds the community gets added with default opt-in where mods can react if something unwanted starts happening.
I mean if you click on subscribe, to subscribe to all the communities within, that’s kind of intended behaviour?! If you just view it, it shouldn’t really be an issue. I guess there is some way to figure this out in an acceptable way.
But yeah, we can scrap my idea if it’s used this way. Maybe just don’t offer one big subscribe button for all of the group, so users need to make a deliberate choice and click on all the communities seperately?
How’d you follow a feed to regularly visit if not without subscribing to it? The person you responded to complained that communities may get unwanted traffic if they were included in bad feeds. So while you suggested subscribers only comments and it would work for ‘all’ feed to filter out low effort trolls it wouldn’t work with feeds where they are already subscribed to it.
Just like with communities where you don’t look them up each time you want to see their content and you subscribe to them to have them easily accessible on you subscribed list or in subscribed feed the same would go for feeds.
I may have missed your subtle suggestion somewhere about changing the behavior of feeds in which case the feature would check out although that would cause some friction still when it comes to ease of interaction.
E:
I mean if you click on subscribe, to subscribe to all the communities within, that’s kind of intended behaviour?!
The conversation isn’t about fair users anyway. If someone comes in without care about community talking bs then it wouldn’t matter if you gave them option to avoid it because they would do it anyway. Just like people don’t bother with block feature which there always was.
It’s more about users not giving a damn which can already be seen with users using ‘all’ feed downvoting or responding with unfitting comments to things that they should have just ignored but didn’t because it showed up to them.
If the user visits feed expecting specific content just like they’d expect from community and treat it as such there’s a good chance they’d contribute but not in positive way.
The feature is in a testing phase to find bugs and collect ideas and will be improved with time so such problems would hopefully be minimised. In which direction will the feature progress is something I don’t know and from my understanding the devs don’t fully know either but they’re definitely interested in allowing more control over things like community opting out (or in?) from a specific feeds as a second option besides opting out from the feature completely. In what form the mods will have the tools to control to which feeds their communities belong I don’t know but there’s a lot of interest in it.
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!:-)
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. :(
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.
Possibly. (Subscribing to a feed does actually subscribe you to all the communities in the feed. So technically they are not drive-by comments by non-members. But I see what you mean.)
Discoverability is a huge huge problem with all federated platforms and this will significantly alleviate that.
If I don’t misunderstand then you can only add communities to these feeds that are already known to your instance, thus I don’t really see how this solves the federated discoverability issues which are ultimately due to instances not being aware of each other at all.
The feed creator needs to know about the communities so they can type/paste the community address in, yeah. This feature takes the expert fediverse landscape knowledge contained in the heads of the terminally online and makes it available to more casual/new users.
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! 🥳🎉
Subscribing to the feed subscribes to communities in them = federation solved.
On top of that the content is over there organised for you which is not something you otherwise have. You have discoverability solved in 2 ways. If someone has a good feed and you see a cool community missing you can message the owner for them to add it building the collection as a community.
c/all is worse imo and with feeds you will at least have control over picking topics you’re interested in unlike c/all. We should be focusing on opting out from c/all more as it causes far more damage and it’s been that way for a long time unlike feeds on such a small platform that just got the feature implemented.
Also the opt-in would be a great way to KILL the entire feature that’s been the most hyped up and requested feature across the entire threadiverse. BRUH
Imagine having all communities opted out from c/all by default. That would be stupid and make everything hard to access.
Opt-out on the other hand for public feeds specifically is something that I support. But then good luck having that supported on lemmy where almost all communities exist.
E: c/all is just one monolithic feed forced on all users for better perspective about the issue. With custom feeds much like with communities you pick out your interests and follow them specifically and it’s all optional. I don’t see how it could cause more damage than this.
Lemmy already has a setting
community.hiddenso that communities dont show up on the All feed. But this is not easy to access at the moment. I can fix that.Oooooooh, love u.
deleted by creator
Yes having that option more easily accessible would be much apprechated.
Opened an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5458
@[email protected]
Yes the All feed has the same problem, but posts need to be significantly more popular for them to even register in the All feed. Thus most small communities currently fly under the radar of the All feed, and if they do get a popular post it nearly always becomes a moderation nightmare.
Hashtags on Mastodon have a similar problem, having given rise to the universally dreaded “reply guy” issue.
I think most people on Lemmy haven’t really thought this through and what the implications of such a feature are once it becomes widely used.
And no, the one that is doing the opt-in is the person creating the feed without asking the community that is being forcefully opted-in. Giving them the option to veto that is better than having them realize that they have been opted into something they don’t agree with by being flooded with trolls and off-topic comments.
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. It’s very bare-bones at the moment.
Im still confused on what your worry is? That people will reply to a post without reading the comments?
No, the problem is that people that have no relation to the community start commenting and getting into arguments.
Say for example a /c/anarchism gets added to a “politics” feed. And suddenly you have a bunch of people that have no clue (or even a pretty false idea) commenting on posts in the anarchism community because they think it is just another politics posts. Then others that are actual members of that community start getting into largely off-topic arguments with these commenters and when moderators step in you shortly after get complaints from people about being “censored for their totally valid opinion about politics” and so on.
That’s a valid concern. And I think to solve that in a clean way and altogether, they need some options to restrict commenting or voting to subscribers only. Meddling with other features and how communities can be found, so people can keep hiding in Lemmy’s noise… is a very indirect approach and doesn’t go all the way.
I’ve seen a bit of that issue in connection with the All-feed. Back when AI was still largely hated on, we regularly had some amount of downvotes creep into the few dedicated AI communities. And while I support people downvoting the flood of AI related stuff in general news and technology communities, I don’t see any reason to drive-by downvote an AI post in an AI community. But that has stopped since. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone come in and pick fights or something. It was just some minor but noticeable and constant stream of downvotes. So I can definitely see how these things would be annoying to some people. On the other hand I think people wanting to subscribe to things and having curated feeds, might also be a valid request.
Feeds subscribe you to those communities. Maybe if the feature didn’t do that it would make more sense but with the current way things work it would require a different solution. Personally I strongly believe in granular control over to which feeds the community gets added with default opt-in where mods can react if something unwanted starts happening.
I mean if you click on subscribe, to subscribe to all the communities within, that’s kind of intended behaviour?! If you just view it, it shouldn’t really be an issue. I guess there is some way to figure this out in an acceptable way.
But yeah, we can scrap my idea if it’s used this way. Maybe just don’t offer one big subscribe button for all of the group, so users need to make a deliberate choice and click on all the communities seperately?
How’d you follow a feed to regularly visit if not without subscribing to it? The person you responded to complained that communities may get unwanted traffic if they were included in bad feeds. So while you suggested subscribers only comments and it would work for ‘all’ feed to filter out low effort trolls it wouldn’t work with feeds where they are already subscribed to it.
Just like with communities where you don’t look them up each time you want to see their content and you subscribe to them to have them easily accessible on you subscribed list or in subscribed feed the same would go for feeds.
I may have missed your subtle suggestion somewhere about changing the behavior of feeds in which case the feature would check out although that would cause some friction still when it comes to ease of interaction.
E:
The conversation isn’t about fair users anyway. If someone comes in without care about community talking bs then it wouldn’t matter if you gave them option to avoid it because they would do it anyway. Just like people don’t bother with block feature which there always was.
More like reply to posts without regard for its host community. In other words, context collapse where the community is the main context.
Wouldnt each post still indicate what community its on though?
It’s more about users not giving a damn which can already be seen with users using ‘all’ feed downvoting or responding with unfitting comments to things that they should have just ignored but didn’t because it showed up to them.
If the user visits feed expecting specific content just like they’d expect from community and treat it as such there’s a good chance they’d contribute but not in positive way.
The feature is in a testing phase to find bugs and collect ideas and will be improved with time so such problems would hopefully be minimised. In which direction will the feature progress is something I don’t know and from my understanding the devs don’t fully know either but they’re definitely interested in allowing more control over things like community opting out (or in?) from a specific feeds as a second option besides opting out from the feature completely. In what form the mods will have the tools to control to which feeds their communities belong I don’t know but there’s a lot of interest in it.
I agree. Multi communities are great. But managing a community’s connectivity with such features makes a lot of sense too!