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.
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.
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
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.
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.
this post is going to blow up in like 3 years
It will definitely start to happen more as more forums start to join the fediverse (discourse for Eg).
Aren’t forums absolutely notorious for forbidding “thread necromancy”?
Yeah necroposting is almost always frowned upon in favor of making a new post.
Forms vary with those types of rules. I absolutely hate the ones that are autolocking after a few days/months.
Hm I always avoid replying to anything older than, say, 2 days because I assume it’s pointless and/or it annoys people
I definitely wouldn’t find it annoying.
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.
I work with a product enjoying a 27 year support window.
That’s WAY more than 2 days.
Same, old habit from reddit, probably because it’s so huge it was hard to get seen when something was an hour old, much less a day. I probably shouldn’t do that here.
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.
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 @technomad@slrpnk.net 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.
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 - Musicals@kbin.social 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?
This can’t be true, right? I swear I’ve subscribed to communities or magazines and have seen older posts on them before. Otherwise, they’d always be blank.
It means you weren’t the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.
Gotcha. Well that’s annoying. They should definitely fix that before version 1.0.
You can pull posts and comments into an instance by searching their original link in the search bar. It’s a bit clunky and doesn’t transfer vote counts but it works.
I do hope it’s fixed in the future since it is annoying, though since all the APub services have this issue, even the very polished ones it might be a while.
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
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.
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
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.
Oddly enough, just last week I got a reddit notification that someone had replied to a comment I made… 11 years ago.
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?
A week ago someone commented on my 9 year old reddit post.
They grow up so fast.
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.
Some content does get locked but usually it’s when the comments go off the rails, so it’s pretty rare
