this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Lemmy

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Should Mastodon votes be federated into Lemmy? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am concerned that Mastodon's unary-vote system (favorites), and Lemmy's binary-vote system (upvotes with downvotes) are mutually exclusive.

In a unary-vote system, a post's vote count generally has little use beyond expressing the post's absolute popularity/engagement, whereas, in a binary vote system, a post's vote count can be used to gauge opinions, such as its level of quality, trust, or agreement. This difference in usage makes me concerned that the votes federated from Mastodon will water down the votes originating from Lemmy.

Currently, I can think of two possible solutions to this:

  1. Lemmy de-federates any votes originating from Mastodon (might be tricky as it would rely on all instances following suit)
  2. Add an option for the user to toggle within their settings allowing them to toggle off non-binary votes.
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[โ€“] aaaa 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand why they federate together at all. Microblogs are different types of discussions from threads, and shouldn't be mixed up this way.

If anything, they should be completely separate sections of the site so you can browse the microblogs if you want.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Microblogs are different types of discussions from threads

That's really just a matter of how information is displayed, is it not? Fundamentally, the architectures are pretty much identical -- is this not the fundamental reason for why the fediverse exists?