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