the /c/imaginary x spam is killing me. - eviltoast

Browsing new or Hot and seeing 15 posts in a row to /imaginarytanks, /imaginarycars, /imaginaryaviation, etc. got old the 2nd time I’ve seen it. I’ve had to resort to blocking the communities and bot that’s just spamming for content.

  • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago
    hooh boy. i'm going to make this foldable because this will be a long comment

    in general, i think a hierarchical community system would be leagues better than a tags system. for tags to be really useful, they have first-class citizens: allow me to subscribe to just /c/community@instan.ce#favouritetag (or /c/community#favouritetag@instan.ce?)[1], allow me to subscribe to just that tag with rss, and allow me to add just that tag to a multicommunity, when they’re released. with all of those features, it may as well be a subcommunity, but i digress

    this issue seems to be confused between two or three different things called tags, as well, which is an issue for readability but never mind

    A post tag would be defined as a “subtitle” of the post inserted by a mod of the community (or an admin) after the post is published, with the purpose of categorizing or adding flair to the community post. It would be displayed in the post listing alongside the title in a smaller font, inside a bordered box, reddit style.

    i quite like this. i’m presuming it’d be similar to reddit’s “flair” system

    Also, the main usefulness of tags, is being able to list / filter on them, which already works with searching. Lets say a music community requires a [Genre] tag, so if you wanted to list all the rock posts, you could just this: https://dev.lemmy.ml/search/q/[rock]/type/all/sort/topall/page/1.

    this i would say is another point in favour of tags, as the mod of a community could add them whereas we currently can’t edit post titles (which is good)

    i can’t remember, however, whether reddit allowed >1 flair per post. this seems like something that’s almost compulsory

    Have you considered tags as an alternative to sub-communities? It seems to work pretty well for lobste.rs, this is where they discuss their reasoning: lobste.rs/about#tagging

    this seems like a terrible idea. i will copy a comment from reddit and the response from the sift developer, which didn’t really solve my qualms:


    i feel like this would not be a reddit alternative, more a twitter or tumblr alternative.

    subreddits are (or were) disparate communities, with different philosophies. if somebody tags a post with #trans and #gender-critical just because it relates to both; the comments will be an absolute cesspit

    That is a reasonable concern. Sift is aiming to be something of a hybrid/hopefully superset that can be used reddit like or twitter/tumbler like.

    The community aspect is indeed tricky. The solution we are trying is to use our reputation graph (see my top level post for more information) to pick out which comments get shown to which users.

    The hope is that this will allow us to support partially overlapping virtual/individualized communities. In your example the #trans folks can be having a discussion about the article and mostly seeing posts from other #trans folks (because of their graph connections) and the same for the #gender-critical side. What will also (hopefully) happen is that some of the (highest quality|funniest|best reasoned|least offensive|…) things from each side will float up to the top of the graph intersection and maybe give a little bit of a chance for some constructive cross dialog.

    Sift is aiming to let everyone be a “mini-moderator” of their own experience and then also propagate that curation to others who will find it useful.

    Our model does have potential failure modes of even worse echo chambers, but we are well aware of that and trying our best to design around it.

    We’ll be having more discussion of this over at /r/siftquest and (eventually, when it supports discussion better), sift itself.

    now i personally dislike that idea. i don’t want my experience curated by a “reputation graph”, i want it curated by me. but this is a bit of a digression as i presume this idea was never really considered


    Hierarchicial tags — a cool feature to borrow from Tildes! […]

    this actually seems like a reasonable idea, but it was abandoned due to mastodon[2]

    I think the idea of using nsfw, cw, and spoiler tags for labelling objectionable content should be considered. This idea originated from Tildes, where hierarchical tags are used to add specifics. I no longer think hierarchical tags are a good idea, however, as they could potentially break compatibility with services that use tags differently.

    this is a great idea! there should definitely be more than one “blur post” tag. in fact, an editable CW: reason[3] so that users can pre-emptively block tw tags they don’t even want to see blurred would be great too

    to be honest, i think the current “spoiler” formatting is bad as well - it should just be called “folded text” or “<details><summary>” or something, and have a spoiler system that just blurs, or blacks out the text/images which would work as block or inline

    I disagree for a couple reasons:
    \

    They would enable better discoverability on non-lemmy software where hashtags are the main topical grouping mechanism right now.

    so zcdunn is proposing they’re cross-community? that sounds like it would make things awfully cluttered

    While lemmy uses communities for topical grouping, some posts might fit into multiple categories, even unrelated categories. Crossposting sort of solves this, but crossposting can be considered spammy if it’s done too much. And crossposting creates another post which fractures the conversation. This may be desirable sometimes, but a poster may also prefer to keep all the conversation in one spot.

    see my thoughts on sift. i’d rather posts be crossposted so that the comments sections would be separated per community

    as a less inflammatory example: if a cinnamon news post is tagged Cinnamon and Linux, half the comments will be “man, i could never use cinnamon, they don’t even support wayland”, drowning out actual cinnamon users because there’s less of them

    It would allow finer grained filtering of posts, even within a community. Users may be interested in a topic, but not every facet of that topic.

    this is the only good use of them, but see my first point

    @remram44 I think we’re talking about different types of systems. What i’m suggesting is hashtags that work the same way as the rest of the fediverse. A user could tag their own post when they create it; no other user would be able to tag your post.

    You would be able to write a post like this:
    URL: example.com
    Title: Whatever
    Body: Hey check out this interesting #Elixir post that discusses possible #BEAM optimizations
    Community: !programming@lemmy.ml

    and it would have the hashtags Elixir and BEAM. Users on pleroma/mastodon/misskey/etc would be able to find the post on their instance under either of those hashtags.

    this is, in my opinion, the worst possible solution. twitter posts read completely disjointedly, as there are random punctuation marks and diffferent coloured text strewn haphazardly throughout the post, like twitter. it becomes almost unreadable. just tag them when posting, like we do with nsfw currently

    To add to @techno156:

    Protocol:
    According to w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-tags a general tag object exists in the ActivityPub protocol. As dessalines said having unmoderated tags is not an option here as it would increase moderation work too much.

    emphasis mine

    i’m not entirely sure i see this - dessalines never explained why it would increase moderation…

    To whoever starts working on tags, can we please add a feature that allows for advanced tag filters? I want for those things to be possible:

    1.) Don’t show posts with choosen tags
    2.) Show posts where all of choosen tags exist
    3.) Show posts with at least one of choosen tags
    4.) Show posts with at least one of choosen tags but exclude ones that have choosen unwanted tags

    this is another great idea; and ideally would be added to the url scheme as well (/c/community@instan.ce+#wantedtag-#unwantedtag? i’m not sure how to implement this)

    @Neshura87 This probably can be a separate issue but if we are about to implement advanced filtering for tags then maybe we could implement date filtering along tag filtering? Saying that here because I thought that ideas/features overlap a lot and it would be better to have it made together. :x

    you are on fire here

    that’s pretty much everything i have to say, i’m sorry it’s so long. any comment i haven’t commented on i either agree with, am neutral on, or haven’t seen


    edit 2023-07-12:

    On another topic, it would be awesome having Mastodon-style featured tags, but for communities.

    (I’m probably getting ahead of myself.)

    this also sounds awful. it will just propagate what is currently popular, making it more popular. this is already a problem with sorttype=active. it will cluster all the conversation into one tag, making it continuously popular. don’t do this.

    issue #1459

    i missed these, so i’ve never used them; but this seemed like a really good idea

    Categories have been removed, and there is #317 for tags.

    ah, shame


    1. edit: don’t use hashes for this. they don’t work in urls. i’m dumb. ↩︎

    2. honestly i feel a lot of my issues stem from interopability with mastodon. i wish we weren’t interoperable with mastodon. the twitter model breeds vapid and pointless comments like this. i’d rather a static tag similar to reddit’s, as that’s designed for a link aggregator not a microblogging site. but maybe that’s just me ↩︎

    3. e.g. CW: Gore, CW: Sexual Abuse etc. ↩︎

    • Tywèle [she|her]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      I agree with you. A flair system like Reddit has seems reasonable to further organize a community but hashtags like Mastodon or Twitter would be a mess IMO

    • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I need to mentally prepare my ADHD brain for this before reading it xD. I will go do something else before I get ready lol.

      • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        no worries, i don’t even expect you to respond to all of it. i did just sort of ramble for a while. but i thought it might be good to have on hand when you talk to neshura

        i didn’t even read it that much, so i apologise for any formatting errors (i wrote it in a text editor outside of lemmy)

        • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Alright, my response is… Tags won’t function like mastodon and such, each community will have their own tags to further categorise content of a general topic that sublemmy is about. (Edit: actually, I think it may be do BOTH of those things now that I read my conversation with the dev again)

          This is what the dev said about stages of tag system (in my conversation with him on dc):

          Stage 1: Tagging and Presets (Community and Instance, no User defined Tags allowed)

          Stage 2 (not sure if I’ll do that): Filtering, Cosmetics? (Border, Text Color)

          And this is what he told me when I asked about the possibility of stage 3 of the tag system where you can subscirbe to only certain tags so only choosen content from a community shows up on your feed:

          I think backend wise not worrying about that is fine for now, the separation of tags per community can be achieved by filtering tag AND community ID in the filter, which could just be hidden from the user or displayed, there’s a separate discussion to be had about the filter features. Point is not separating these tags per community shouldn’t limit their filterability because community id’s already exist. Plus by not splitting them up in the backend general tags can be used across instances a lot more easily.

          Subscribing to tags in a community could then work similar to that filter, again the issue would be how to make the UI bearable but backend wise should be no problem to implement.

          So my idea is possible from what he told me. The problem is that we need to make the idea known and we need to find someone who will work on it because the dev isn’t even sure if he will be the one that implements stage 2 when I’m talking about stage 3. Also, to implement my ideas for stage 3 we need foundation to be laid out which means that the stage 1 and stage 2 need to be completed first.

          For the stage 3 to be implemented (if anyone decides to implement this AT ALL) we will need to wait for weeks at best and months at worst. Now this makes it hard for me to decide how to proceed with my communities because the path of the tag system is not yet clear and I need to decide NOW which communities should be separate and which should become more general.

          Edit: I talked with the dev, it will take months to reach stage 3. And I realised just now that not all content on c/imaginaryaviation will be vehicles which means that I will need to a create a new sub called c/imaginarylocomotion to be able to fully capture both of the subs.

          • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            (Edit: actually, I think it may be do BOTH of those things now that I read my conversation with the dev again)

            yeah, the thread was hard to follow due to people talking about different concepts without realising. i feel like that would need to be clarified before implementing one (or both[^hopefully not])

            Stage 1: Tagging and Presets (Community and Instance, no User defined Tags allowed)

            Stage 2 (not sure if I’ll do that): Filtering, Cosmetics? (Border, Text Color)

            yeah this seems fine (although cosmetics seems like a late stage issue to me, but meh)

            I think backend wise not worrying about that is fine for now, the separation of tags per community can be achieved by filtering tag AND community ID in the filter, which could just be hidden from the user or displayed, there’s a separate discussion to be had about the filter features. Point is not separating these tags per community shouldn’t limit their filterability because community id’s already exist. Plus by not splitting them up in the backend general tags can be used across instances a lot more easily.

            Subscribing to tags in a community could then work similar to that filter, again the issue would be how to make the UI bearable but backend wise should be no problem to implement.

            i’m not surprised, that makes sense. as an aside: there are community id’s? like, uuid’s? or does he mean just comm@instan.ce which is, i guess, an id?

            For the stage 3 to be implemented (if anyone decides to implement this AT ALL) we will need to wait for weeks at best and months at worst. Now this makes it hard for me to decide how to proceed with my communities because the path of the tag system is not yet clear and I need to decide NOW which communities should be separate and which should become more general.

            in my (irrelevant) opinion, separate communities are better. it’s a paradigm that everyone knows, rather than some nebulous proposal that 1) may not be implemented 2) may be lacking features (rss etc.) 3) will almost certainly be more complex to use. also you could merge them at a later date and add links to the archived versions in the sidebar. not really optimal, but it is a solution

            adding them all together won’t prevent spam (although i guess it would make it easier for people to block…). there will be the same volume of posts, just all in one place. i have been trying to avoid flooding local though. i have a whole folder of art to add to these subs. although to be honest, i’ve no sympathy with the op. browse subscribed if you don’t want to see irrelevant posts. if you browse all, be prepared to see posts you have no interest in

            Edit: I talked with the dev, it will take months to reach stage 3. And I realised just now that not all content on c/imaginaryaviation will be vehicles which means that I will need to a create a new sub called c/imaginarylocomotion to be able to fully capture both of the subs.

            ah yes, convoluted and intermingled subs. fun

            • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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              1 year ago

              i feel like that would need to be clarified before implementing one (or both[^hopefully not])

              The dev will write a github issue with everything described for stage 1 of tags before proceeding to gather opinions. But he will only mention stage 2 and stage 3 of tags and I will have to make issues for stage 2 and 3 myself.

              yeah this seems fine (although cosmetics seems like a late stage issue to me, but meh)

              I would love to have an option for customizing the looks of the tags to make it more easly browsable when you have more than just a few but yeah, it’s not something that would need to be implemented in stage 2.

              i’m not surprised, that makes sense. as an aside: there are community id’s? like, uuid’s? or does he mean just comm@instan.ce which is, i guess, an id?

              I just found this on github. It was mentioned by nutomic a month ago:

              Each Activitypub object (post, comment, user, community) has an ID. In case of posts this looks like https://lemmy.world/post/1 with the domain where the creator is registered. When another instances fetches the post, it inserts it in the db and renders it as a link with the db post.id column value, eg https://lemmy.ml/post/3. So the problem is that the url id is exactly the same as the db id, which naturally differs between instances. A cleaner solution for this would be random IDs as described in #1101. This is what Peertube does for example.

              ah yes, convoluted and intermingled subs. fun

              Yeah, that would make the sub waaaay too general. I will leave the imaginary aviation as a separate sub but imaginary ships/subs on the other hand is something that I can merge with imaginary vehicles. I also think that I can merge imaginary armies with imaginary characters and just give them their separate tag once they come out. There shouldn’t be a problem with both of those cases.

              I also have this weird sublemmy called “imaginary cities/cityscapes/landscapes” because it’s about cities but cityscapes very often are also portraying a landscape. I can either make “imaginary scapes” (ik this sounds weird lol) and use it for starscapes, landscapes, skyscapes, cloudcapes etc. and have a separate sublemmy for showing inside shots of cities/villages where far away shots of them would be counted as a “scapes” to which will be included in “scapes” sublemmy and not the sublemmy about cities/villages. The second option is to include cityscapes in sublemmy about cities and repost artworks to imaginary scapes if it contains a landscape on top of a cityscape. But that would result in a lot of reposts though and this would make the OP very sad. There’s also a third option where I include scapes, cities, cityscapes and villages into one place BUT that’s not the content of the same topic which is a very not cool thing to do. What do you think?

              Edit: I also think that I could move imaginary tanks into imaginary vehicles too.

              • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                The dev will write a github issue with everything described for stage 1 of tags before proceeding to gather opinions. But he will only mention stage 2 and stage 3 of tags and I will have to make issues for stage 2 and 3 myself.

                i guess i’ll have to keep an eye on the gh then - presumably it’ll be on lemmy-ui

                I also have this weird sublemmy called “imaginary cities/cityscapes/landscapes” because it’s about cities but cityscapes very often are also portraying a landscape. I can either make “imaginary scapes” (ik this sounds weird lol) and use it for starscapes, landscapes, skyscapes, cloudcapes etc. and have a separate sublemmy for showing inside shots of cities/villages where far away shots of them would be counted as a “scapes” to which will be included in “scapes” sublemmy and not the sublemmy about cities/villages. I also have this weird sublemmy called “imaginary cities/cityscapes/landscapes” because it’s about cities but cityscapes very often are also portraying a landscape. I can either make “imaginary scapes” (ik this sounds weird lol) and use it for starscapes, landscapes, skyscapes, cloudcapes etc. and have a separate sublemmy for showing inside shots of cities/villages where far away shots of them would be counted as a “scapes” to which will be included in “scapes” sublemmy and not the sublemmy about cities/villages

                i, personally, would prefer the former. i don’t know which is objectively better, but i was actually considering making a “grungy hamlets” sub.[^stuff like this] although i didn’t really know what to call it. so i’d like / will make a “street level views of mediævil/vicorian/cyberpunk distopic towns”, but i have no interest in wide grandiose vistas.

                i don’t really have strong opinions, but that’s my thoughts. i wonder if we should make some sort of discussion group with tywele, sebinspace, and remus989 to make co-ordinated decisions?

                • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Alright, inside city/village shots will have their own sublemmy and cityscapes will be moved to scapes.

                  i wonder if we should make some sort of discussion group with tywele, sebinspace, and remus989 to make co-ordinated decisions?

                  YESSS, I was already thinking about it but I wasn’t sure how to proceed with that.

                  Edit: I just realised that merging imaginary soldiers/armies with imaginary characters is not an option because imaginary characters sub focuses on single characters.

                  • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    d’you want to pm them? i have a matrix at @zeusofthecrows:matrix.org and a telegram but not much else (and a discord that i generally avoid opening)

                    i don’t want to end up as some tyrannical ruler of the imaginary network though