Community Boundaries and the All feed
It recently struck me recently that a number of users mostly scroll the All feed. This came up in a conversation where people were discussing how their main usage of lemmy was to scroll All and then rely entirely on blocking to refine their feed.
Now whether that’s a pathological instance of Hyrum’s law of all possible uses being relied on or an intended or fair use of a lemmy/reddit system, it does strike me that a substantial portion of the user base doing this likely has an effect on what happens within communities and the ability for communities to define themselves.
Thoughts and speculations (and perhaps paranoia/exaggeration):
- I don’t know what happened on reddit in this regard, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a relatively high proportion of users rely on All as described above compared to reddit in order to “fill out” their feeds more due to the smaller user base here.
- A higher amount of All-feeders means fewer people willing to invest, contribute to or even care about specific communities.
- This likely means community migrations away from toxic mods, or, starting new communities can run into more friction or less engagement.
- Which, arguably, becomes a problematic feedback cycle in which All becomes a “better” feed than curating a set of subscriptions.
- Perhaps a clear mechanism for this to manifest is that anyone can up/down vote anything, which means All-feeders can influence what appears in Subscription-feeders’ feeds by imposing their tastes/preferences on posts’ scores. In fact, if All-feeders are substantial in number and activity relative to Sub-feeders, this could be a sizeable influence on post ordering across lemmy/threadiverse.
Now I don’t know if any of this is really a problem at all, I’m just thinking out loud here (as, to make my bias clear, someone who doesn’t get using the All).
As far as Lemmy design decisions go:
- Should non-subscribers be allowed or disallowed to vote on posts/comments in communities they’re not subscribed to? My intuition on this is obviously not (ie, disallowed) and that the All feed is just for browsing not participating. For me, it’s about enabling communities to form their own identity and sub-culture that doesn’t get pushed around by others.
- How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
- You could limit voting to those who have a subscription to the community, but then anyone could just easily subscribe and then vote while sticking to All. And that’d be harder to implement too I’d imagine.
- Maybe communities should be able to control this behaviour. Private and local-only communities are apparently on the road map. Excluding non-subscribers from voting seems like a reasonable continuation of such options.
- To get even more annoyingly complex, I could imagine communities having the option to exclude down votes or exclude down votes for non-subscribers. I’m sure that’d raise issues for some people’s feeds as non-down-voting communities might unreasonably rise to the top or something. But if multi-communities come along, and voting in All is off or not guaranteed, this feels like a non-issue to me.
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