Content jacking/reposting is a problem on Lemmy.

This is often used to attack or force migrate conversations from a instance someone doesn't like to another instance they do like. It's offensive by its very nature.

I have to say I haven't come across this issue too often as I basically never browse /All. But I definitely have noticed this with cm0002's personal crusade against .ml pissing off more than one poster in communities I follow.

If it absolutely must be copied then the cross post mechanism should be used.

We literally have reposting bots for hackernews, reddit, Twitter, etc. It's nearly infinite content out there.

Hurting Lemmy users makes it harder to grow the platform

I could not agree more. @cm0002@lemmy.world could maybe use a bit of self-reflection in that regard.

Another problem Piefed has solved by aggregating crossposts into a single thread.

I haven't seen this, so can't speak on it. What's the difference between someone reposting the same article/crossposting and content jacking?

Happy with how PieFed deals with it. Lemmy often feels like a ghost town with posts having zero comments. PieFed combining them takes most of that away, and I guess it reduces any incentive to 'pinch' other people's posts?

Lemmy as a social media discussion forum is about human attention. The economy of success on lemmy is curating a audience and having their attention both in terms of voting, but more importantly, in terms of discussions.

Competition between communities is healthy and good

• Better content
• Better curation
• Better community (welcoming, etc)

Trying to "boycott" or starve out other communities by making them "redundant" by burning out human attention on lemmy is bad for everyone

• Lemmy feels empty
• Repetition of content is wasting people's time
• Dividing the conversation drives people away

If you hate a community, make a better community, don't try to burn out everyone who likes the old community.

I cross-post to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly the instance as a whole to make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don't want to defederate, is because .ml still has some very large comms and some niche comms

Megathread on the issue

Some highlights from the link:

"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167

"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342

.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 ::: spoiler CW: Original transphobic Comment from Nutomic

:::

And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can't even put them all here because this comment would be really long.

Whatever harm you think this does to the Lemmy-verse pales in comparison to the harm .ml and the behavior of its admins does because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform

On the outside, bringing up Lemmy always leads to comments like "Lemmy? Isn't that the place with a bunch of tankies?" Or "Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left"

One question for @jet@hackertalks.com

I've been reposting content from !buyfromeu@feddit.org and !BuyFromEU@europe.pub to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk when that movement was still very active.

There was even a !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com post about it: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39614799

My rationale was that

• due to the current way Lemmy handles crossposts (compared to Piefed), comments of crossposts are not consolidated, so people will only see the comments from one posts, which means that discussions should happen on one single community to be seen by everyone
• there were no rules or moderation policies differences between the three communities

Wanting to consolidate similar communities is a regular topic here, with the last attempt from 2 days ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47122168

But sometimes some posters just want to stick to their home instance rather than consolidate.

I've been in a similar situation for !android@lemdro.id and !android@lemmy.world, as well as !movies@piefed.social and !movies@lemmy.world . There was a regular poster who would only post to the LW versions, even though I reached out several times to them, offering them mod positions on the other communities.

They now stopped posting, so the two non-LW communities are now more active than the LW versions, but that's a bit unfortunate as it would have been better to have them continue posting on .

In those cases, should content crossposting stop?

We usually tell people "if you don't like a community, make your own and convince people it is better". Having more content usually makes a community better. And also, in a lot of cases, people just repost content from Reddit anyway.

Open for comments and discussions.

Complaining about "stolen" memes on these forums is always cringe as fuck

especially to us enlightened piefed users who get them all combined anyway

What do you mean by this?

I do sometimes see a link post on Lemmy (often on some general community like !games) and copy it to (usually more-specific, like gaming genres: think copying from !games to !rpgs) communities I am active in (or sometimes ones I am not but am aware of: if I see a strategy game post I'll put it in all the relevant strategy game communities I know of), and figure it is alright because I always see a little "cross-posted to:" and the community I got it from, so I figure that is good enough for credit. Probably obvious I got it somewhere else, and easily clickable to find out where. (Or sometimes the little communities are just the communities I myself already posted it to.) Is this a bad assumption and I should stop?

I do it because I want conversation in the specific communities, and for things that could go in more specific communities to not only get talked about in one giant umbrella when the smaller niches already exist on Lemmy. Especially because I think there is a valid reason to not be on !games. Maybe you are not interested in most posts there, just some subgenres, or like me, you are sick of the ragebait-but-also-probably-true-news-so-not-off-topic-and-allowed posts.

I am fine stopping though, less work for me, and as life gets busier I have less time for Lemmy anyways.

I admit I exclude .ml from my crossposting bonanza because of all the political drama I hear about but never bothered to look into, because I feel I'll end up drawn into a political slapfight. Just look at all the comments here about .ml, whether justified or not (not sure and not about to try to figure out). I do not sub to anything on .ml and mostly look at Subscribed though, so I know I am not taking any of their content and copying it elsewhere, unless it was first copied from .ml to something I do look at. I also don't really look at the instance someone is commenting from unless I suspect trolling or we interact a lot though, so I am not being nasty to .ml users for just being on .ml, either. I know a lot of people who do not have anything to do with the political drama are there too because it is recommended as the Lemmy dev's instance, and I do not expect everyone to litmus test every social media for political drama before joining it.

I feel you. This is quite an interesting thread to read and the different opinions in the comments.

I also think this is a problem for Lemmy. We could be better than other social media sites. Have genuine human conversations. Post high quality content that matters to us. But we regularly don't. We dump the news, re-post memes... And I mean there are people who like it. But I don't. I'm here for the comments and I'd rather talk to people than have a lot of noisy content dumped at me, burying human interaction with fabricated activity that's following some ulterior motives, like make the place seem more busy, or do some internal politics... Which may be warranted. But those aren't genuine in my opinion. It's not some other user who likes to talk to me, but someone fabricating something, and it regularly makes me feel used. Plus I'm pretty sure I see it chill engagement.

Well, the good news is that at least some of those that sort by new/all know that the newest version of a repost is the newest, and that the last one is the earliest.

The issue you're raising is one I've had conversations about in meat space.

The problem with that is that not everyone who knows about it pays attention to it, or bothers to report things since it would require scrolling back

Personally I rarely report because I have no way of knowing if a link came independently or via repost. It's easy to spot when it's something like a meme or similarly identifiable, but even then it may not be intentionally douchey, just thoughtless. So reporting isn't necessarily a primary option.

I don't think there's an easy solution to the problem tbh.

Nah ML is trash. Moving off the remaining non-tankie communities would be a good thing for Lenny as whole.