Feeds are a combination of communities into one, like multireddit or mastodon tags.
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Neat, it federates. Seems to work similar to a normal community, so it should be easy to follow these feeds from Lemmy.
While the actor is a
Groupand you can follow it, no posts areAnnounced. All the federation of posts is still driven by the individual communities within the feed. You’ll need to modify Lemmy to add the logic of subscribing to the constituent communities when you receive anAccept.Also there are
AddandRemoveactivities sent out whenever the feed owner manages the list of communities within which would need to be handled.Documentation still to come…
Ah its more complicated than I thought. We also have a similar or same feature on the roadmap, when I get to that it can federate with Piefed.
For the federating its a new kind of AP actor. I’ll be putting in a FEP for it in the near future, but its basically a “Group” that only cares about the “Following” collection.
You can see example json for the AP interactions here: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/activitypub_examples/feeds
The AP interactions for a Feed are:
- Send a Follow request for a Feed
- Accept a Follow request (this is automatic for public feeds)
- Reject a Follow request (this is automatic for private feeds)
- Announce an Add of a Community to a Feed
- Announce a Remove of a Community from a Feed
- Send a Delete of a Feed to subscribers
That’s cool, i hope lemmy federates with it in the future :D
Reminder that Piefed’s patreon is only at $13 a month. If you have the means, consider donating to the project to say thanks for all of the work and effort being put into it :)
To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/
100%. Rimu, jollyroberts and andrew are all amazing people, providing both piefed and .social itself for free. They work very hard, and hell, the feeds PR was only created 4 days ago, and pushed today!
Piefed and its devs deserve way more :D
This is huge. Thank you to everyone involved.
So do I understand correctly that these are identical to Topics, except customizable without requiring backend changes?
Sweet!
Exactly :)
This is great but I still don’t think it fixed the issue that both softwares have, what do you do about wanting to share the same content between multiple same named communities without spamming?
I still really like the idea that communities can choose to federate with each other. You post to privacy at ML and LW and it shows as one post in both communities.
Yes, that is high on the agenda.
Exciting! I’ll try to get my piefed running again then
This doesn’t appeal to me at all. The whole point of Lemmy is that I can avoid certain instances that have oppressive admins.
PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect iirc) can already do this, by blocking all users from the instance. It works much better than the Lemmy equivalent that would be better named as a community muting, since it still allows users to troll you in communities located on other instances.
I don’t want to block the users though, I just don’t want to be subject to their authority. Which means I can’t use their communities. Combining them into one big bag subverts my autonomy to do so.
???
Just don’t use public feeds and have your own private feeds split into topics you’re interested in where you don’t have communities you dislike included. You have all the autonomy you need. No one tells you to subscribe to that one specific feed that doesn’t curate the communities in the way you like. Just use it to organise your own subscriptions to have them by topics or catered for different moods of the day.
Maybe I worded it poorly, I know I can still do my thing, but I’m explaining why I would never use this unless it excluded certain instances.
I missed this at first as well, but the “Create a Feed” button (colored almost the same as the background for some odd reason, using the PieFed theme) is accessible to you as a user, not simply an admin. So if you wanted let’s say [email protected] and [email protected] but not [email protected], then you could do that. You probably should name it something appropriate like technology2, but mainly I mean that you are not limited to Feeds created by other people: the whole point of this is that now you can create your own (if you want to that is, or perhaps someone will have already done so).
The whole point of lemmy is decentralization. Not being run off by bad mods. I agree that a lot of big instances have rude admins and mods but this idea is for similar communities with similar modding. If the mods agree then what’s the issue? A lot of big instances communities have the exact same mods anyways.
An example for my use case is I want to support slrpnk and post on their selfhosting com but I don’t want only 1 answer. Federating my post to all three big selfhosting communities would allow more interaction while still being decentralized in the sense of not instance dependent.
An example for my use case is I want to support slrpnk and post on their selfhosting com but I don’t want only 1 answer. Federating my post to all three big selfhosting communities would allow more interaction while still being decentralized in the sense of not instance dependent.
Stick to one community. Assess pros and cons of similar communities and choose one. Create meta posts to discuss the choice with other members.
I disagree. Especially on coms where one needs answers. But I want to support smaller instances.
Ironically, if Lemmy supported decentralization of communities in this way as PieFed now does, and as I guess Reddit did iirc, then you could post to a smaller community and people who were subscribed to such a multi-community feed would be able to see it.
However, there are many features of Lemmy that are even (far) more authoritian in nature than Reddit. Lacking both a modmail and hiding the account name of the mod who removed something of yours, plus not sending you any notification about the event, are three such examples, and there are many more where that came from.
On Lemmy, as on Reddit, a mod “owns” their community, and that’s all there is to it - there is no decentralization inherent in the system, at least at the community level. Where the decentralization comes from is the ability to pack up and move elsewhere if needed. Or course, you would be able to take none of it with you, nor be able to leave a message at the old place that you had migrated. As you see, decentralization, while nowhere close to a “myth”, is quite constrained - mainly I mean, that functionality is available to admins, more than mods. So nobody can tell you what to do with the communities on your personal machine, running the Lemmy software, which is open source.
Although PieFed allows for greater levels of decentralization in numerous ways, chiefly with the Topics and now the ability for users to create their own custom ones.
Although a caveat is that “cross-posts” - even those sharing identical URLs - between multiple communities are not collapsed in the listing of posts in a feed (yet, although as Rimu said it’s a high priority to add that).
Thanks for taking the time to write this! This is well written and you make some excellent points.
Hiding mod accounts names is a weird choice and not notifying bans if even odder. Wonder the intention?
You make a great point with feeds! I didn’t consider that.
Less goo!
Fedipie.dbon1.com? We have the technology for 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!:-)
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.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.
Yes having that option more easily accessible would be much apprechated.
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.
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.
Feeds subscribe you to those communities
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?
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!
Does posting to a feed post to all the communities in it?
Feed isn’t a place you can post to. It just collects posts from different communities into one feed/stream.
