Community Boundaries and the All feed
Community Boundaries and the All feed
It recently struck me recently that a number of users mostly scroll the All feed. This came up in a conversation where people were discussing how their main usage of lemmy was to scroll All and then rely entirely on blocking to refine their feed.
Now whether that's a pathological instance of Hyrum's law of all possible uses being relied on or an intended or fair use of a lemmy/reddit system, it does strike me that a substantial portion of the user base doing this likely has an effect on what happens within communities and the ability for communities to define themselves.
Thoughts and speculations (and perhaps paranoia/exaggeration):
- I don't know what happened on reddit in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if a relatively high proportion of users rely on All as described above compared to reddit in order to "fill out" their feeds more due to the smaller user base here.
- A higher amount of All-feeders means fewer people willing to invest, contribute to or even care about specific communities.
- This likely means community migrations away from toxic mods, or, starting new communities can run into more friction or less engagement.
- Which, arguably, becomes a problematic feedback cycle in which All becomes a "better" feed than curating a set of subscriptions.
- Perhaps a clear mechanism for this to manifest is that anyone can up/down vote anything, which means All-feeders can influence what appears in Subscription-feeders' feeds by imposing their tastes/preferences on posts' scores. In fact, if All-feeders are substantial in number and activity relative to Sub-feeders, this could be a sizeable influence on post ordering across lemmy/threadiverse.
Now I don't know if any of this is really a problem at all, I'm just thinking out loud here (as, to make my bias clear, someone who doesn't get using the All).
As far as Lemmy design decisions go:
- Should non-subscribers be allowed or disallowed to vote on posts/comments in communities they're not subscribed to? My intuition on this is obviously not (ie, disallowed) and that the All feed is just for browsing not participating. For me, it's about enabling communities to form their own identity and sub-culture that doesn't get pushed around by others.
- How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
- You could limit voting to those who have a subscription to the community, but then anyone could just easily subscribe and then vote while sticking to All. And that'd be harder to implement too I'd imagine.
- Maybe communities should be able to control this behaviour. Private and local-only communities are apparently on the road map. Excluding non-subscribers from voting seems like a reasonable continuation of such options.
- To get even more annoyingly complex, I could imagine communities having the option to exclude down votes or exclude down votes for non-subscribers. I'm sure that'd raise issues for some people's feeds as non-down-voting communities might unreasonably rise to the top or something. But if multi-communities come along, and voting in All is off or not guaranteed, this feels like a non-issue to me.
So... As someone who uses the all feed and that includes finding this post and subsequently interacting with it. There are reasons to use all. I use my subscriptions more as bookmarks to have an easy return path to a community should I feel the need to really check up on that particular community. I then use all to browse for interesting content to read and possibly interact with. I don't use local because that feed gets stale with things I have already seen very fast and I don't look at only subscribed feeds because I don't want it to be an echo chamber of my own preferences.
I block communities that don't interest me, can't interact with reasonably anyways or that are simply annoying. As it is I don't see a problem with using all since it still drives interaction via comments like this one. You can't really restrict voting either since that creates more issues than it solves. Remember that voting on a post is interaction too even if there is no comment from someone. Perhaps that person is short of time or just doesn't have anything to add.
At the end of the day it is personal choice how people choose to discover and interact with content.
I think the problem with this approach - read: the reason I don't do this - is that you're blocking communities from ever appearing again, and if your interests change, you still won't see them. I think this is more likely to result in creating an echo chamber.
What I do is subscribe to communities that I found interesting, and then scroll all once in a while to see if there's something else I likeThanks!
I don't think this is such a big problem as you present it to be. Reddit in fact started out with only "All" and only later added subreddits. There are also certain benefits to "all-feeding", like making communities easier to discover.
I think disallowing votes (down or both) from non-subscribers would defeat the point of the all feed, which to me is to display the most active/interesting posts on the Fediverse right now. You can't have that if it is only community subscribers that vote.
Also, as far as I know, it is quite uncommon to follow communities on Mastodon, so you'd exclude voting from there potentially. In general, you need to always consider the implication for not just Lemmy but how it works underneath on the ActivityPub level and the interaction with other software.
I think it is to be expected that we have a lot of all-feeding here in the start when there is not too much activity. In short, it requires a lot of effort to use the "all-feed and block"-method on reddit as you would need to block a ton of subreddits. So subscribing to the specific stuff you want is easier. But on the Fediverse there aren't as many communities yet so "all-feed and block" is easy enough. This will hopefully change as the Fediverse grows.
Maybe you could somehow have both? I.e. when browsing all, take into account all votes. When browsing a specific comm, have a toggle for including or excluding votes from non-subscribed users in the feed. But not sure how hard that would be to implement.
There are also certain benefits to “all-feeding”, like making communities easier to discover.
You can discover communities just fine without being able to up/down vote.
think disallowing votes (down or both) from non-subscribers would defeat the point of the all feed, which to me is to display the most active/interesting posts on the Fediverse right now. You can’t have that if it is only community subscribers that vote.
You can see what all the subscribers find interesting instead. Like I said, intuitively, the All feed makes sense to me as a view of Lemmy, not a means to participate. And, to the general point of the post, to enable the All-feeders to become a somewhat distinct "voting block" runs the risk of dissolving the ability of communities to be their own places.
Also, as far as I know, it is quite uncommon to follow communities on Mastodon, so you’d exclude voting from there potentially.
That's not true I don't think. You can't follow the "All" feed from mastodon. You either follow a community (or, interestingly, a particular user, which is something you can't do from lemmy).
Maybe you could somehow have both? I.e. when browsing all, take into account all votes. When browsing a specific comm, have a toggle for including or excluding votes from non-subscribed users in the feed. But not sure how hard that would be to implement.
That's kinda interesting!
think disallowing votes (down or both) from non-subscribers would defeat the point of the all feed, which to me is to display the most active/interesting posts on the Fediverse right now. You can’t have that if it is only community subscribers that vote.
isn't this what 'scaled' sorting is / could be for?
I'm not sure what it is "for" exactly, but in practice it tends to show a lot of brand new posts with zero comments or votes
I do this sometimes purely as a way to find content I otherwise wouldn't. The most active communities on lemmy are meme communities, so once you block them you basically have a feed of pretty great content to scroll through.
so once you block them you basically have a feed of pretty great content to scroll through.
This makes sense!
Blahaj zone doesn't do downvotes, so that side of being visible on /all is a non issue. The only thing that really seems to be an issue is that we will get the odd post intended specifically for members of the community that get visibility in /all, and a bunch of non helpful/irrelevant replies.
I think it would be nice to be able to make some posts "community members only", but other than that, I generally think communities are helped by the increased of exposure that comes from /all
I think it would be nice to be able to make some posts “community members only”
This would make a good amount of sense as part of the local-only and private communities features IMO.
Ideally, it wouldn't be either of those things.
Trans communities for example, Closeted trans folk benefit from people being able to see trans communities and browse them, and just lurk before they post or before they're ready to join a private community.
Yet at the same time, sometimes, members have questions that really only other trans people can answer. And there is no problem with other folk seeing it or even engaging with the content, but once it hits all, the ratio of useful answers goes down. So being able to just stop some posts from hitting all, without otherwise locking them down would be a nice option
I am still waiting for multilemmies to become a feature so I can better organize my feed.
Me too.
Also if people wanted a private community couldn't they just use an unfederated server?
Yea, but to be fair that is a higher boundary to entry. With private communities, someone else can do the hosting while all the users have to do is click buttons in a UI. Obviously we're not talking about encrypted privacy, but it's something and a welcoming fusion of closed and open spaces in social media TBH.
Rather than having my All feed spammed with walled gardens I'd rather mods who don't want outside participation to be able to stop their communities from showing in All.
I’d rather mods who don’t want outside participation to be able to stop their communities from showing in All.
Agreed. Niche communities can get hammered with downvotes and "I don't want to read this" comments from readers of ALL.
It's confounding: "show me everything", then "I don't like the content in your niche community". WTF?
Agreed. I think something like this makes a lot of sense as a feature along with the private community feature being worked on.
while i don't have any specific opinions about this that other people haven't addressed, i just want to flag up something;
How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
this seems unenforcable. as in, you can't really tell where someone discovered a post from. yeah you can just remove the buttons from those views clientside and it'll probably work for the majority of cases, but alternate clients or modifications to lemmy-ui can simply put the buttons back in (or in cases of unmaintained or differently opinionated clients, just not remove the buttons at all). the backend can't really differentiate which view a vote comes from. federation especially can't differentiate which view a vote comes from.
Yea I realised that after I posted. I wasn’t really thinking about implementation details, and intentionally so, I was just trying to think through it from a UX perspective.
But yea, you’re absolutely right. With an API and federation, there is no such thing as “no upvotes from a certain kind of feed”. It was kinda dumb of me to suggest. Still, I’m personally happy to think out loud.
Limiting votes (and other interactions as mentioned in these threads) by whether a user has subscribed is more viable, but then again federation probably disrupts this again (I don’t know enough to be sure) and likely breaks some promises or conventions.
I'm mostly reading my subscribed feed, and sometimes switch to all and if I find an interesting community, I subscribe to it too. The only communities I have blocked are either porn related or operating in a foreign language, which I see even though havening set my language preferences.
Yea this is me too. All is for exploring for communities or just lazy doom scrolling.
Sorry, if you remove my ability to interact with posts through the all feed, I will stop using this site. With how little content exists on this platform, there's little point in curating a feed. You either visit a specific community for specific information, or you browse all. It would just be an annoyance anyway, akin to the awful reddit "no-participation link". These measures do absolutely nothing to stop bad faith actors and only serve to annoy normal users and push them away from the site.
Fair!
I suppose private communities probably address a lot of what I’m talking about.
I browsed reddit the same way, I’m probably not gonna change. It’s just easier to filter the firehose than make my own from scratch
Not allowing people to vote on posts from All - yes please! There's so many cases of subreddits losing their identity because they started showing up on Reddit's All.
Yea interesting. I don't know enough reddit lore to be sure of this, but I figured that there would be stories. Any more details?
For me, it seems pretty logical that this would happen (which is why I wrote this post). I realised that intuitively I'd never even thought of voting from the All feed and had to double check whether it was possible.
This doesn't mean I'm right and that it shouldn't be allowed, but instead, that there may be some real tension here and reasonable mental models of what a community is that go both ways on this.
If All can see you, All can participate. Nobody gets an unchallenged megaphone.