Fediverse

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

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.

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

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.

this post is going to blow up in like 3 years

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.