This is a thought I had mostly to do with Lemmy but I feel likes it’s relevant elsewhere in Fediverse.
As far as I know Lemmy doesn’t lock posts after a set amount of time like Reddit does and I feel like this is a good thing for smaller niche communities. For example if I created one for a one off video game or cancelled TV show it could be hard to generate new content to post to really help it take off. It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.
I feel like I haven’t see it a ton yet but I hope it’s a way Lemmy and the Fediverse can be different from sites like Reddit.
I’ve noticed that some people do use other filters than “Hot” or they scroll back in smaller communities, because I’ll occasionally get comment replies to posts I made months ago. It’s cool to see.
Let’s all agree right now that we’re not going to be a community that necro-shames.
EDIT: JUST TO BE CLEAR I MEAN MAKING PEOPLE FEEL BAD FOR POSTING IN OLD THREADS AND ONLY THAT ONE USAGE OF THE TERM
I, however, am okay with both.
Hm I always avoid replying to anything older than, say, 2 days because I assume it’s pointless and/or it annoys people
I work with a product enjoying a 27 year support window.
That’s WAY more than 2 days.
Depends on the content and context. Some older post, even years old, might totally okay for discussion. Just like those traditional forums with years of ongoing threads.
I often find I can’t see old posts in active communities, and on masto my instance only holds 2w worth of cache because the owner is but one man not a corpo with endless storage.
yes I think there can be a lot of power here, Reddit was really bad about this
sometimes I like to sort posts by “New Comments” so it’s like an old style forum, Reddit couldn’t do this at all and it was awful, Lemmy’s “Active” sort is also pretty good for this
This is the way it should be.
I’ve never understood the people who get upset over ‘necroing’ a thread, whether it is on an old school forum or something formatted like Reddit.
I think it necroing posts on Reddit makes sense. There’s a lot of very specific posts that can vary slightly from each other but I find with forums you can get a general post for a topic that has 30+ pages of responses and it can be a bit of a pain to comb through all of them at times. In my experience I see a lot of people linking to other comments in the forum because something has already been brought up a few times.
This is basically what @[email protected] said about beating a dead horse but I feel like it’s slightly more tolerable with a Reddit style system where there’s more posts with at least minor differences. It’s a bit easier to follow.
This could also just be the forums that I have used shaping my opinion
Maybe something similar to do with ‘beating a dead horse’
the problem/issue was (potentially) already discussed, and renewing the issue is tiresome for the regulars who see it repetitively brought up? This is just my guess.
If it is about a problem they had and the thread didn’t have an answer, then they should be obliged to necro if they found a solution.
For technical discussion, sure. I’ll be one of the first people to say look at the sticky, look at the pins, look at the megathread, read the FAQ, read the wiki.
For purely social discussion like casual chat, entertainment discussion, or random musings, I would say it doesn’t make sense.
I’ve seen comments and replies on my posts, that came weeks or months after I made them. I’ll respond to them if they are anything more than “Haha yeah that’s cool!”
There has to be more to add to the conversation, otherwise it will be like posting a 3 year old article to the news community.
I definitely encourage people not to be shy to post and comment on stale communities that haven’t seen recent activity, that can get the ball rolling to revive it.
It would be good if a comment bumped a thread to the top of the “new” feed.
Does the Active feed work this way?
Active is a combination of that and hot but is essentially hard capped at 2 days. Things past that wont show up
Theres the new comments sort which works like that though
ive been runnin kbin for > 6 months… its kind of neat how i get comments from months ago from some new instance that just spun up somewhere, or some newer user commenting on older stuff out there in the ether.
youre right though, gotta stick with your account once you have it… its like email. very targeted.
this post is going to blow up in like 3 years
Oddly enough, just last week I got a reddit notification that someone had replied to a comment I made… 11 years ago.
One thing standing in the way of this is the inability to move identities in Lemmy/Kbin. This is my 3rd time with a “Maximum Derek” user in the Threadiverse; my first was on Kbin back in June when it was really struggling, then I went to a Lemmy instance that just disappeared one day. If you try to engage with any of my posts I made while on those servers, I’ll never know it.
f*ck vlemmy 🤡
In my case it was fossware
You gotta host your own instance so that when it disappears you can only be disappointed in yourself.
But what if I already am
This is more of a front end thing. Mastodon sometimes revives old content by people boosting an old post that could go viral again. Lemmy’s algo is designed around hiding older posts as they age. I could see this being more relevant in upcoming software like Discourse and phpbb which are adding fedi support. They’re more traditional old-school forum software and I think that revives older content better, as one user commenting on an old post will bring up a thread to the top again.
traditional old-school forum software and I think that revives older content better, as one user commenting on an old post will bring up a thread to the top again.
Lemmy does this if you use the “New Comments” sort method
We’re referring to discovering old posts here, not when you already have a post open.
I’m not talking about the “New” sort method for comments, I’m talking about the “New Comments” sort method for posts
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they are created or receive a new reply, analogous to the sorting of traditional forums
It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.
One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - [email protected] then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.
This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.
I thought you still got all the posts, just not any of the comments?
