this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I, however, am okay with both.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

🤨 Be careful where you take this conversation...

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We don't know how the fediverse would play out in the long term but I expect a few things:

  • Lemmy devs will implement locking old posts in the future
  • instance owners will decide on their post locking policies
  • Many instances will not survive for as long as Reddit survived till today
  • Third party archivers (perhaps archive.org among others) will need to step in and archive posts. Ofc archived posts is not interactible.
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I agree with your points. Especially the third one. I do hope a majority of instances op-out of locking posts but I could see large instances like lemmy.world definitely jumping to do it and focus more on new content and expansion

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (4 children)

It would be good if a comment bumped a thread to the top of the "new" feed.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (2 children)

flashbacks to single word "bump" posts

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I feel like Reddit's version of bump was people commenting This all the time

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Nothing was more infuriating that being on a tech forum, seeing someone post the same problem you were having, 4-5 bumps, then the OP saying "Nevermind, I got it" and the thread closing

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Does the Active feed work this way?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

Yeah, that's what it does

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There’s a “sort [posts] by new comments” option.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

To me, this option works much better than "Active", "Hot" and others.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

this post is going to blow up in like 3 years

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

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

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oddly enough, just last week I got a reddit notification that someone had replied to a comment I made... 11 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I got gold off a door pun once, 2 years later. Had a hand full of 3-4 year old comments get a reply. BUT 11 DAMN YEARS?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

I miss the old OpenID way.

We need a very, very simple ID server that everybody should be able to install, even as an app for smartphones and ActivityPub (and others) able to communicate to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I guess self hosting is the only sure way

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

Perfectly fine in my opinion. It isn't like oldschool forums where a reply bumps a thread to page 1.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I've had it happen that i joined a community and commented in some interesting thread and only then noticed that it was 3 or even 6 months old

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Hm I always avoid replying to anything older than, say, 2 days because I assume it's pointless and/or it annoys people

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

I definitely wouldn't find it annoying.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

Pointless part I can understand, but annoying? What's more, it should prove what you make effort to post can still get engagement over time, and not scattered to winds.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I work with a product enjoying a 27 year support window.

That's WAY more than 2 days.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It will definitely start to happen more as more forums start to join the fediverse (discourse for Eg).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Aren't forums absolutely notorious for forbidding "thread necromancy"?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

I find myself commenting on “older” posts fairly frequently, I’m not actually upset at there being “less” content.

This place feels like Reddit did 15 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Doubt it as they will get buried anyways. Forums should be more common and even they autolock threads. At some point in time you have to reframe the content into the current cultural context.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I get what you mean but I think it's a decent way to breath some life into older small communities and show the people posting there it wasn't for nothing. The relevancy of a post doesn't always have to fade as well.

I still prefer people posting new content but I think engaging with old posts can be beneficial.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I lost count of the posts on Reddit, which i found really interesting, reading all comments and eagerly wanting to post a comment myself, just to see the lock

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