Lemmy community account on mastodon boosts both posts and replies
when i follow a lemmy community on mastodon, the “account” of the community boosts both posts and replies - that is not how it is on lemmy itself, and the replies being boosted lead to a lot of out-of-context on my timeline. why is that so, and is it possible to change it so that it boosts only posts?
Excellent question!!
~88%
of monthly active users of the whole fediverse. Personally, I’d like to see that get below50%
and ideally around20%
, assuming mastodon doesn’t change too much.posts
withcomments
attached. Everything is apost
that can also be areply
to another post. As a result, everything just gets dumped into the feed like a giant stream of stuff. There’s no way, that I know of, to view only top-level posts (that is, posts that aren’t replies). Along with the lack of threading, mastodon is basically antithetical to any structuring of online social media content, which is striking given that we have basic structuring in every other form of online content from email to old school message boards and forums to facebook and twitter and youtube and any normal webpage.groups
, where a lemmy community is agroup
. These manifest on mastodon as users/bots that boost. But that’s not what a group is really (or at least how lemmy/kbin and probably facebook/friendica see them). They’re spaces in which multiple people (ie a “group”) can post in regards to a specific topic or parent post. So already, apart from the above points, you’re fighting uphill when it comes to mastodon and an alternative more structured format of social media.backfilling
, which is fetching all of the relevant content when prompted by a user. Instead mastodon relies on everything being on the local instance, which is filled up by all the users followed by users of the the local instance. If that doesn’t provide some content, then you never see it. Communities/groups work differently. The idea is that you’re supposed to see exactly the same replies/comments no matter which instance you’re on. So on mastodon, the idea of receiving only top-level posts in your feed, and then, when you’re interested, viewing all of the comments, without those comments always filling your feed, doesn’t make sense. As that would be backfilling and it’s not something mastodon does.All up, I can’t see any of these problems, let alone all of them get better any time soon. And, IMO, this is to the detriment of mastodon and, as it’s the dominant platform, the fediverse at large. Communities/groups are a fantastic way to connect with people. Apparently mastodon will be implementing groups of some sort, which might help. But then there’d still be the issues of whether mastodon interoperates well with other platforms. Given all of the above, I wouldn’t have high hopes, though I’m happy to be proven wrong.
More broadly, I think a successful fusion of microblogs, normal blogs and communities into a single interface/platform is one of the next steps the fediverse can make in its growth as a major alternative to big-social-media. It’d be novel, a killer feature arguably and it’d bring people together more effectively while also giving people plenty of options for how and where they want to connect.
I think the time is ripe for mastodon alternatives, like lemmy and kbin, to get more attention and investment from the fediverse at large.
end rant (sorry!)
Very well said.
@maegul pardon me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Mastodon meant to be more like Twitter and Lemmy Kbin more like reddit? They’re fulfilling different purposes, just can communicate to each other. I subscribed to Lemmy community from Mastodon so I could get a form of chronological newsfeed (also, the mastodon application ecosystem is far more mature)
Lemmy Kbin was never meant to replace Mastodon, only coexist