I commonly browse all by new, and I block users who crosspost any given article to more than one other community. To me it’s almost always a sign that they actually don’t care about the topic or contents, but instead their own post count and user recognition.
Lemmy really needs to have some sort of built-in mechanism for grouping cross posts like this, because it does look spammy in the feed.
The users doing the cross posting aren’t doing anything differently than they’d do by posting a link to multiple subreddits. It’s just that there’s no sorting algorithm on Lemmy, so there’s no “smart” filtering happening behind the scenes to keep it from looking as cluttered.
I do think part of the problem is that people are treating this like Reddit. A quantity versus quality, shotgun approach to populating communities. It’s just uncurated noise.
True, but I feel like that’s a necessary evil in order to encourage growth in the platform. There’s gotta be something for people to see when they visit, otherwise they stop coming. And social platforms don’t really work if people aren’t being social on it.
Some may argue that this is actually a good thing and that it keeps uninterested users off the platform in the first place, but I feel like that’s putting the cart before the horse, because users need a reason to be interested in the first place.
It’s a little forced, to be sure, but I think that’s just got to be part of our growing pains for a bit until the community at large is a bit more fleshed out and certain posting conventions are established. A lot of things are also going to be changing pretty rapidly, since Lemmy is still in pretty active development, and the rush of new users has jolted that development recently, too. So there will be new features and a new culture to adopt to eventually.
Given that federation naturally leads to fragmented communities it’s expected that there will be some portion of users who subscribe to only one instance of a community and so would benefit from cross-posts. I don’t think it’s necessarily conceited on the poster’s part to cross-post content that they think would be of interest to multiple versions of the same community on different lemmy instances.
Likewise it’s also natural that another portion of users will subscribe to every version of a community across all instances so that they don’t miss anything. In that case lemmy-ui needs to be able to consolidate duplicate posts across instances, and cross-posts are the natural linking mechanism for doing that. Cross-posting actually helps (or could help) lemmy to build feeds that don’t contain a bunch of duplicate articles - something which I see a lot of. I’m not sure if it’s a feature of lemmy-ui already, but it certainly could be.
Unpopular opinion confirmed. Unless you’re talking about cross-posting to multiple unrelated communities, in which case I agree.
what? you mean to say you don’t like having the same post appear 4 times in a row in your feed?!
shocking.
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I do it while listening to Nickleback.
LOOK AT THIS GRAPH
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I always feel a bit weird about crossposting myself for this reason. I do it mainly with the hope that more people will see the community I posted from, or to add something to a community that I want to see grow. But I don’t think I ever posted something to more than three communities, and everything I’ve posted so far had been made by me.
Yeah, I do also feel like there’s a fine line. I personally reserve it for communities I’m active in, and trying to nurture naturally. And again, only one crosspost at a time.
So, serious question:
There’s a group “Progressive Metal”.
There’s another group “Music”.
I post things to both, but almost all the time when I post to the former I cross-post to the latter because all progressive metal is music (and thus topical) but not vice versa.
Do I get blocked?
Eh, meh, like I’d have to see it. The way you’re explaining it, I probably wouldn’t block. Again, because it seems like you’re trying to enrich communities that mean a damn to you. If you were just flinging shit to be the king of shit, who broke the news of the shit first… yeah, I’d block.
For me, you are. Imagine thematic communities in a tree-like chart: there’s the Entertainment community, there’s the Music community, and there are the communities by subgenres, music memes community, artists’ pains and struggles community. The narrow topic should belong to the farthest branch of this tree, IMO. The higher-level communities (wider themes) should only get posts that do not meet any of the lower-level (narrower themes). The narrow community should form as soon as the high-level one gets regular posts of enough quantity to form one (subjectively).
This stance would make sense if groups were in any way tree-structured.
They aren’t.
The two groups I mentioned above are (I think) on entirely different instances. (If they aren’t, they could be.) There’s no hierarchy.
You are right. I am, as always, idealizing.
Am I on your blocklist? I’ve done some cross posting of my own content. Things have settled down now, but I know for awhile there it wasn’t really clear which communities were going to take off.
Nah. I think my post comes across a little more rigid in theory, than in my practice. I’m blocking people that are really just spamming shit, with little interaction with the communities they’re targetting. If it seems like someone is legitimately trying to engage, I won’t.
i see name multiple times in a row in new, i block. i see bots, i block.
time will come that i will ask on a self post “why am i alone in lemmy?”
I wonder if you’ve blocked me. Lat night, two different posts of mine got on all. Wasn’t my doing. It wasn’t a crosspost though, two different posts in two different communities.
no I have not. I only block mostly bots truth be told. I do understand that there are multiple communities in different instances with the same name and purpose. I do not block indiscriminately, I do look at the history and debate myself first before deciding on it.
Ok, fair enough.
fediverse is made of fragmented communities, each having different levels of community reach and engagement. I post news of the ethnic & communal genocide going on in Manipur, India and knowing that the government led by Hindu supremacist Modi only pays attention to internatonal pressure, cross-post to international news communities. There are 3 such (that I know of) and each has a diferet audience.
It is not for post count nor user recognition nor boosts (none of which are of any value IRL), it is to gather global attention to a barbaric genocide currently taking place in a country recignised by the world as being democratic and whose leader is welcomed and feted by world leaders. Today is the 83rd day of this ethnic & communal genocide, and only the EU Parliament has stepped up to condemn it. You might have seen the news of the 2 womeanded over by cops to themob, to be stripped naked, paraded, molested, and gangraped? It is but one of the 100 such happening, in the words of the state’s rotten Chief Minister who is considered by many as an active supporter of the genocide.
I crossspost so every time any country or world leader welcomes him, the citizens of that nation know who their nation welcomes & honours. My effort is only a drop in the ocean and probably worth nothing, but it is essential for the victims that the crimes committed against them are not hidden.
Would this count for OC? I write political journalism pieces that I post in a couple of different places here on Lemmy, for critique and of course eyeballs.
I wonder if I’m one of the culprits.
I mean, you’re not on my blocklist.
I actually don’t typically block people who are clearly looking for help or input on their work. That’s just something that is gonna happen, and I’d prefer people find the assistance they need.
Lol, someone was so upset by this, that they went through my post history and downvoted the couple of crossposts I’ve made in the past.
That’s why I find the whole fantasy internet points thing hilarious, personally.
Their only true merit, is the ability to gauge if your post fits with the general vibe of a community. They’re just digital dousing rods.
(Dear inevitable downvoters-after-reading-my-mockery-of-you: Go for it tigers. I don’t even see the votes. They’re blocked in my browser.)
I got downvoted every single time I mentioned reports on Reddit. Oh, well. Downvoting doesn’t hurt. At least maybe I found a few users who stopped chaotic reposting after reading through my described way of thinking about it.
