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.
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.
It would be good if a comment bumped a thread to the top of the “new” feed.
There is also the option to sort by “active,” which is not exactly what you are describing but makes it more likely to see older content. Some apps default to this sorting mode
Does the Active feed work this way?
Yeah, that’s what it does
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
There’s a “sort [posts] by new comments” option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lemmy does this if you use the “New Comments” sort method
We’re referring to discovering old posts here, not when you already have a post open.
I’m not talking about the “New” sort method for comments, I’m talking about the “New Comments” sort method for posts
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they are created or receive a new reply, analogous to the sorting of traditional forums
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.
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
Oddly enough, just last week I got a reddit notification that someone had replied to a comment I made… 11 years ago.
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.
f*ck vlemmy 🤡
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
Hm I always avoid replying to anything older than, say, 2 days because I assume it’s pointless and/or it annoys people
I work with a product enjoying a 27 year support window.
That’s WAY more than 2 days.
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.
