Feeds are a combination of communities into one, like multireddit or mastodon tags.
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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.
Is there a plan to implement the possibility of a downvote free experience? Kind of like an instance disabling downvotes does on native lemmy?
Yes, that’s a setting that admins can choose for the entire instance. Also if downvotes are on then at the community level mods can choose whether to accept downvotes from members, the current instance, trusted instances or everywhere.
This doesn’t appeal to me at all. The whole point of Lemmy is that I can avoid certain instances that have oppressive admins.
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.
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 technology@lemmy.world and technology@beehaw.org but not technology@lemmy.ml, 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).
Thanks, I assumed they were centrally created but if they are user customizable this does make it a bit more appealing, although at that point it’s not hugely different from the way subscriptions work now. Could have some use cases though.
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 :)
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
To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/
Does posting to a feed post to all the communities in it?
This is huge. Thank you to everyone involved.
Trying it right now, it’s pretty sweet
new blaze account? 😭
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.
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).
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.
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
Hmm so the
Feedactor mainly consists of a following collection and uses Add/Remove activities. This really sounds like it should be aCollectionand not an actor.Possibly. At the end of the day it’s all just JSON.
Here is more detail - https://codeberg.org/JollyDevelopment/fep/src/branch/jollydev/fep-1d80/fep/1d80/fep-1d80.md
