I’m seeing the federated content, but it’s hard to tell where the content came from. Currently, the only reliable way to see the source is by reading the URL when you’re viewing a thread. It doesn’t work well on mobile though and it doesn’t work for the feed.
How work everyone feel if the magazine included the source always? So instead of saying kbinMeta, you’d see [email protected]? Or would you prefer another solution?
In a fediverse, does it really matter? (yes it will be nice to have though, maybe just because we haven’t adjusted to the fediverse mindset yet though).
Yes and no.
Reddit suffered from some massive subreddits that made it basically impossible to actually interact with people. You post something to the sub, no one notices it, and you get no engagement. You comment on an active post, but so do 10,000 other people, so the OP or whoever you replied to doesn’t see your comment, and doesn’t reply back.
It’s just pure noise, and you don’t get to recognize anyone, and no one gets to recognize you. There’s no repertoire building.
Smaller communities are very different, though. You actually get to see the same names pop up over and over again. People actually talk to you. You get to know peoples’ patterns and opinions, and kind of get to see them as people.
So, yes, if all you care about is adding your voice to the public record on something someone else has done, without any care for whether anyone will ever read that record, indiscriminate commenting and posting is fine. And you’re welcome to do that. But if you’re involved in a couple of different communities on the same topic, which happen to have the same handle but live on different sites, it’s really nice to know which one you’re looking at at a glance.
It matters when you decide you care about the community, not just the topic.
From my new-and-limited understanding, it can potentially be an issue if similarly- or identically-named instances are on different servers - someone over on Lemmy noted that the mod of lgbt is also the mod of conservative. If you don’t know a post is from X@kbin or X@lemmy that could be a source of confusion depending on the quality of the different source-communities.
In the grand scheme of things, presumably whichever one is the more user-friendly will get the audience share and the other would wither away to the footnotes of history, but it’s still a potential issue in the meantime. Happy to be corrected if I’m mistaken on all this, still very much a beginner here.
I think it’s very important to see.
Is this viral post from the meme magazine I’m subscribed to? If not I should.
Also paying attention the the rules of whatever instance you are about to post in is pretty important.
I really hate that people want to tie their identity to the fucking website they use. Who gives a shit what instance you came from, just contribute to the discussion!
It’s not about tying your identity to a site, it’s about respecting the community you’re posting in. Magazines aren’t just tags, they are spaces with their own moderators and rules. That’s why it was important to know which sub you were in on Reddit and it’s no different here.
I don’t need to know where a user is from but I do need to know the source of the post.
It matters. For example, if Stormfront runs an instance, that instance will be full of Nazis. There’s no way they will tolerate anybody else there. Ergo, if you know someone is from the Stormfront instance, you know they’re either a Nazi or they’re lost and so clueless that they don’t realize what all the funny crosses mean.
Stormfront people (again, this is an example) will then sic their userbase on any thread about Judaism. They will intentionally exploit the confusion created by lack of context. They will create threads which users don’t realize are transferring them from the world of ordinary humans into the Nazi dimension, where they will be confused and bewildered by the fact that suddenly 80% of their online peers are expressing the kinds of views that are expressed by a Stormfront denizen.
The same will be true when NazBols run an instance and it is already true of the pro-genocide tankies that kbin is already federated with.
It’s not like that, though. Please don’t just assume what our intentions are. We just get confused sometimes, especially on mobile, when there are maintenance and update posts for other sites that make it seem like it’s going to be implemented here. The only way I distinguish between here and there is whether it’s posted by Ernest or somebody else. If we could distinguish between posts by this site and others, we’d be up to date on other sites’ development without getting misled.
It’s not very important on a basic server, like kbin.social or mstdn.social. But the people on mstdn.lgbt probably like the fact that they’re on an LGBT server.