One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it’s a bit less obvious because there’s a wider range of subjects involved.

Except now, it doesn’t, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.

We’re still figuring out whether it’s a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It’s a tricky UX and social question.

I’ve held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it’ll be added soon.

  • cabbage@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    Ragrding merging comments, I think it’s best to keep it as it is - let the user choose which thread they are in and which comment section they participate in. :)

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      13 hours ago

      Same - I often click through the cross-post menu to read all the comments for a thread, but combining them would be problematic.

      Unless they were sequentially after one another, but then you’d still want a cross-post type of menu to jump to one, and once there to jump to the next… and so on. Meh, it could be done, but it’s not really a priority for me compared to other things.

    • Max@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      more importantly: different communites, different rules. If i want serious discussion on a topic, i can visit the community that enforces serious discussion. if i want some fun with it and see memes and shitpost comments to that topic, i go to the other community.

      but i can not have a serious discussion post if it is enriched with memes from an other community.

      i LOVE getting an overview of cross-posts. this allows me to learn about other communities, how active they are and how important or wide-spread a topic might be.

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
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        13 hours ago

        Hehehe, not anymore… :-)

        (Well, I guess still those that don’t involve a link, but this is still a great step forward, worth celebrating! 🎉🎊🥇🥳🍾🍺🎆🎇🎈)

  • Rimu@piefed.socialOPM
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    1 day ago

    A welcome side-effect of this work is that going to another page of posts will maintain your place in the stream so you won’t occasionally see one or two posts from the previous page at the top of your new page.

    • Trinsec@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      Oh is that what the result_id in the URL is for?

      I think I might’ve spotted an unintended side-effect, actually not sure if that was there already but it grabbed my attention now:

      On the first page of my feed, when I select the menu of a post to go block the community that this post is in, the page changes into that community with the mention above that it’s hidden now, and when I page-back I return to my feed with that post not visible anymore.

      Now on the second and later pages, if I do the same, and then do a page-back, the post is not hidden anymore. Refreshing doesn’t hide it either, I have to redo my scrolling from page 1 onwards if I wanted those communities that I just blocked to be hidden.

  • freamon@preferred.social
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    1 day ago

    Bah, it relies on people actually cross-posting, and not re-uploading the image every time, of course. I’ve just seen the posts from this user and they’re all different URLs. Maybe a function can be added for admins to fix-up posts like that to de-dupe them (it’ll last until the OP edits the post, at least).

    • Rimu@piefed.socialOPM
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      17 hours ago

      We do have a function to de-dupe those - click the 3 dots and then look for ‘Delete’ ;-)

      What if… when an image is uploaded we generate a unique hash of the image data and save the file to the server using that hash as the file name. That way if the same image is uploaded multiple times it’ll get the same name each time. Each post will have the same url and the usual cross-posting detection mechanism will take care of it.

      Anyone see any problems with this?

      • freamon@preferred.social
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        17 hours ago

        That sounds like a better idea (when you’re looking for them, you realise how many people don’t actually cross-post stuff “properly”).

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      13 hours ago

      Already being tested, and iirc Interstellar expressed interest in being next (but is that only for Android, not iOS maybe?). I haven’t tried Thunder other than guest mode, but it’s pretty slick imho. I prefer the PieFed webpage tbh though.