Content jacking and top posting other people’s content is really bad for Lemmy. It’s also just being a dick to other people making content on the platform.
- feed is spammy
- divides conversation
- chills engagement
- makes Lemmy less friendly to posters
This pattern is very common on lemmy, and needs to stop.
This is often used to attack or force migrate conversations from a instance someone doesn’t like to another instance they do like. It’s offensive by its very nature.
If you want to make a better community, great, do it but not at the expense of other Lemmy posters.
One question for @[email protected]
I’ve been reposting content from [email protected] and [email protected] to [email protected] when that movement was still very active.
There was even a [email protected] post about it: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39614799
My rationale was that
Wanting to consolidate similar communities is a regular topic here, with the last attempt from 2 days ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47122168
But sometimes some posters just want to stick to their home instance rather than consolidate.
I’ve been in a similar situation for [email protected] and [email protected], as well as [email protected] and [email protected] . There was a regular poster who would only post to the LW versions, even though I reached out several times to them, offering them mod positions on the other communities.
They now stopped posting, so the two non-LW communities are now more active than the LW versions, but that’s a bit unfortunate as it would have been better to have them continue posting on .
In those cases, should content crossposting stop?
We usually tell people “if you don’t like a community, make your own and convince people it is better”. Having more content usually makes a community better. And also, in a lot of cases, people just repost content from Reddit anyway.
Open for comments and discussions.
I gave you feedback about top posting movie content before.
I think it robs the original poster of interaction. If you reached out offering change and they didn’t engage you have your answer
As you said there is infinite content on the internet to import into Lemmy, no reason to steal the interactions from a small lemmy.world poster
If you must do it then it’s good you used the cross post feature so there is some connection back to the original poster.
So in this scenario the lw movie poster didn’t get enough engagement on their content and left… That’s a net negative for Lemmy
From a very practical perspective, it’s faster. The crosspost mechanic, that I indeed use, is just one click compared to having to rehost an image to an external hoster, copy paste that link to Lemmy, then give credits to the OC post (most of what I do on [email protected] )
There aren’t that many posters around. [email protected] had a diverse mod team, several posters, that allowed to “spread the load”. Potential new posters would see that and join the community with several posters instead of one single person. Having one community emerge as “the one” fosters more conversation happening there, compared to posts without engagements (which is a complain you raised in this thread)
Link aggregators aren’t microblogging. It’s expected that different people contribute to a community, if posters want complete control over their content then microblogging could be a better option.
Fair enough, as long as your happy to keep priming the content pump. There will be some posters who washout from such tactics.
Let’s take the opposite extreme. Suppose I really dislike a community and I don’t want it to grow. I could make a bunch of similar communities all over the fediverse. Every time someone posts to the target community I could copy it to a new community every 15m making it look like spam, and diluting any community interaction. Basically I could dry out the human interaction by dosing the content.
If we set the norm that top posting other people’s content systematically isn’t very Lemmy, then we would be in a good place to defend against such dilution.
Sure, some front ends like piefed may help, but not everyone is going to be using those front ends
There are also posters who find it more sustainable when there is another poster around
From the space consolidation thread a couple months ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42022359/18010213
You could. As it would be obvious that in this context you don’t want to grow your community but just spam about the other one, there would probably get called out in a Meta thread in the community you dislike. People there would block your communities.
That goes against the fundamental notion that everyone can start a community. Who decides what communities should stay, and which one should not? At the moment, people vote with their participation, everybody makes their own choices. What alternative do you suggest?
Piefed isn’t only a frontend, it is a different platform.
The Lemmy devs recently stated that this is a client problem, and that they don’t plan to change that
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46984024/19528869
Long term, that will probably cost them, on top of the instance-wide bans regularly discussed.
Mbin has at similar approach where it is possible to see the number of comments on other communities:
https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/2321464/New-Linux-Flaws-Enable-Full-Root-Access-via-PAM-and#comments
The more I discuss this topic, the more I think this is a shortcoming of Lemmy rather than an issue with the people crossposting content.
Isn’t this exactly what we are talking about? Trying to top post another community is stealing interaction, and a method of influencing which communities should not stay.
My stance is
What I understand your stance is (feel free to correct if I’m wrong)
At least not systematically, and not within a day of the original posting (so if something becomes topical)
It’s not a dibs system, so organic collisions where two people really want to talk about something is fine. just systematic reposting of EVERYTHING from people without their consent isn’t good for lemmy.
Not closed, the reposters should be be given opportunities to transition to their own content.
That is a direct aspect of the lemmy model, until such a time as themed communities becomes protocol level. The only way to not have to do this is kill any similar community before it grows.