This might be a client thing, but… I’m subscribed to several overlapping communities: !linux on one server, !linux on another, !linux on two others. Same with !lemmy, !commandline, and a couple other communities with the same topic and slightly different membership and/or focus.

Crossposting is a valid and useful tool, but I’m noticing an increase of crossposting where the submitter automatically crossposts to 4 similar communities at the same time. Seems reasonable, and yet… I’m starting to get annoyed by seeing the same post 4 or 5 times in a row. I sort by New and since the posting happens concurrently, they just spam my feed with a page of identical posts.

I could unsubscribe from some similar communities, but the content doesn’t exactly overlap and I feel like this is solving the wrong problem. I could decide that automatic crossposting by the same author is “bad behavior” and downvote crossposts, but I feel like this solves the wrong problem and violates a valid use case.

What I think a solution might look like involves a unique ID that persists between crossposts, and a corresponding way to filter s.t. only one post is shown. Some communities are more active than others, and comments on a filtered crosspost would be invisible, so it would be necessary to aggregation crosspost comments, interleaving them under the single, unique, unfiltered post. All comments on all subscribed communities where the post was crossposted would be aggregated; replies to any specific comment would reference the comment in its source community and therefore show up in the right community, for folks who aren’t subscribed to multiple duplicate communities.

It requires a more complex solution than it might initially seem. Whatever the solution, I feel as if something should be done, because there’s an increasing noise-to-signal ratio resulting from increased crossposting.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    The way cross posting currently works would be good if we were as big as reddit but we aren’t. What we need is community consolidation. Unless there is an actual reason for community split like world news.ml and world news.world they should work to consolidate.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Hmm. Would that be good, though? Different rules, different moderators. Wouldn’t an aggregation system based on subscription be better? Consolidating would result in a consolidation of power into the hands off a few.

      Consolidation would also encounter trouble when server admins disagree with moderators about community rules. When conflicts happen - which they inevitably would - we’d have a situation where the community would split as some moderators recreate a new community on a different server. It was hard enough when lemm.ee shut down, and that have communities no option but to switch; if the reason for a move is policy and not server shutdown, the chaos would be far worse.

      The more I think about it, the worse consolidation sounds.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I’m starting to get annoyed by seeing the same post 4 or 5 times in a row. I sort by New and since the posting happens concurrently, they just spam my feed with a page of identical posts.

    lemmy-ui has a front page de-duplicator that combines cross-posted links (preferring the first one, but showing the others in a single text line) so you don’t see them multiple times in the feed. Any other front end could add this, the code freely available for anyone to use.

    so it would be necessary to aggregation crosspost comments, interleaving them under the single, unique, unfiltered post.

    lemmy’s GetPostResponse contains a list of crossposts, and it’s up to UI’s if they want to try to combine comments from those (by calling getcomments), in whatever way they’d like. In lemmy-ui we’ve chosen to link the posts at the top rather than combine comment threads.