cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/538685

No more duplicate posts

One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from linux@lemmy.world, linux@programming.dev, linux@lemmy.ml, etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it’s a bit less obvious because there’s a wider range of subjects involved.

Except now, it doesn’t, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.

We’re still figuring out whether it’s a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It’s a tricky UX and social question.

I’ve held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it’ll be added soon.

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Yes, please do!

    Come to think of it, I am aware of one issue where PieFed won’t automatically pull in content when it receives a vote for it - but I discount that as being a problem bc that’s a major issue even among Lemmy instances, just in different ways. I could show you some examples where my votes on a post vary from like 200 to 0 or anywhere in-between (that particular issue was from the post being locked, which ofc I received no notification of that happening, it just screwed up the federation of it across the entire Fediverse).

    Also, the issue I’m thinking of would only affect a brand-new PieFed instance, not an established one that receives the post content as it federated out. And too, the way that Lemmy would handle this would lead to improper vote counts: imagine hypothetically that a post got +1000 upvotes and only 10 downvotes, but then the moment your brand-new Lemmy instance goes online you start to receive exclusively new votes for this post, and let’s say that it receives +2 more upvotes and another 10 downvotes. In this (hypothetical) scenario, the vote counts are MAGNITUDES off from what they should be - instead of showing +983 it would show as -7, thus misrepresenting a “highly popular” post as a “fairly unpopular” one. Lemmy’s approach is to have the post but allow the vote counts to be incorrect, whereas PieFed’s approach is to not pull in the post in the first place (unless someone manually makes that determination to override - which anyone can do, though I’ve argued that this should be a feature that is slightly more hidden or at least not as readily shown to users who, like myself at the time, could unknowingly cause spread of misinformation by not knowing all of these technical details).

    So it’s not that Lemmy’s way is “right” and PieFed’s is “wrong”, but rather both are kinda wrong, iirc, and yet only affecting old posts that brand-new instances are trying to work with, so very much an edge scenario.

    But if there’s something I missed, yes please send me the link - I would like to be informed!:-)

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        I believe I understand it. To clarify:

        The normal Thunder app works perfectly with Lemmy instances. I’ve got it and while I haven’t registered my account with it yet, it works very well even as a guest to read content - it’s a great app!:-)

        There is also a fork for the app, designed specifically for testing purposes, which only works atm (iirc) for a single PieFed instance. This fork no longer works with any Lemmy instances, nor any instances of PieFed either that aren’t running the API code. So it’s testing the backend and frontend connections, requiring specializations on both ends to work at all.

        When all of that is done, the fork can be requested to be merged into the main branch, and become a standard feature of Thunder, to work either with Lemmy or with PieFed instances.

        But notably, getting to what I thought you meant: PieFed itself still connects perfectly to Lemmy, due to its implementation of the ActivityPub protocol (and Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, and whatever else may also use that same ActivityPub protocol to share content).

        I hope this explanation helps at least a little!:-)