This is a thought I had mostly to do with Lemmy but I feel likes it’s relevant elsewhere in Fediverse.
As far as I know Lemmy doesn’t lock posts after a set amount of time like Reddit does and I feel like this is a good thing for smaller niche communities. For example if I created one for a one off video game or cancelled TV show it could be hard to generate new content to post to really help it take off. It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.
I feel like I haven’t see it a ton yet but I hope it’s a way Lemmy and the Fediverse can be different from sites like Reddit.
One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.
This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.
I thought you still got all the posts, just not any of the comments?
This can’t be true, right? I swear I’ve subscribed to communities or magazines and have seen older posts on them before. Otherwise, they’d always be blank.
It means you weren’t the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.
Gotcha. Well that’s annoying. They should definitely fix that before version 1.0.
You can pull posts and comments into an instance by searching their original link in the search bar. It’s a bit clunky and doesn’t transfer vote counts but it works.
I do hope it’s fixed in the future since it is annoying, though since all the APub services have this issue, even the very polished ones it might be a while.