I recently discovered an interesting (and somewhat disappointing, as we’ll find later) fact. It may surprise you to hear that the two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance (that I could find at least) are both on Feddit.dk and are quite significantly higher than the next top comments.
The comments in question are:
- This one from @bstix@feddit.dk with a whopping 3661 upvotes.
- This one from @TDCN@feddit.dk with 1481 upvotes.
These upvote counts seems strange when you view them in relation to the post - both of the comments appear in posts that do not even have 300 upvotes.
Furthermore, if you go on any instance other than Feddit.dk and sort for the highest upvoted comments of all time, you will not find these comments (you’ll likely instead find this one from @Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone).
Indeed, if you view the comments from another instance (here and here), you will see a much more “normal” upvote count: A modest 132 upvotes and a mere 17 upvotes, respectively.
What’s going on?
Well, the answer is Mastodon. Both of these comments somehow did very well in the Mastodon microblogging sphere. I checked my database and indeed, the first one has 3467 upvotes from Mastodon instances and the second one has 1442 upvotes from Mastodon instances.
Notice how both comments, despite being comments on another post, sound quite okay as posts in their own right. A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent “toot” (Mastodon’s equivalent of tweet).
Someone from Mastodon must have “boosted” (retweeted) the comments and from there the ball started rolling - more and more people boosted, sharing the comments with their followers and more and more people favorited it. The favorites are Mastodon’s upvote equivalent and this is understood by Lemmy, so the upvote count on Lemmy also goes up.
Okay, so these comments got hugely popular on Mastodon (actually I don’t know if 3.4k upvotes is unusual on Mastodon with their scale but whatever), but why is there this discrepancy between the Lemmy instances then? Why is it only on Feddit.dk that the extra upvotes appear and they don’t appear on other instances?
The reason is the way that Mastodon federates Like objects (upvotes). Like objects are unfortunately only federated to the instance of the user receiving the Like, and that’s where the discrepancy comes from. All the Mastodon instances that upvoted the comments only sent those upvotes directly to Feddit.dk, so no other instances are aware of those upvotes.
This feels disappointing, as it highlights how Lemmy and Mastodon still don’t really function that well together. The idea of a Lemmy post getting big on Mastodon and therefore bigger on Lemmy and thus spreading all over the Fediverse, is unfortunately mostly a fantasy right now. It simply can’t really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I’m not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).
I personally find Mastodon’s Like sharing mechanism weird - only sharing with the receiving instance means that big instances like mastodon.social have an advantage in “gathering Likes”. When sorting toots based on favorites, bigger instances are able to provide a much better feed for users than smaller instances ever could, simply because they see more of the Likes being given. This feels like something that encourages centralization, which is quite unfortunate I think.
TL;DR: The comments got hugely popular on Mastodon. Mastodon only federates upvotes to the receiving instance so only Feddit.dk has seen the Mastodon upvotes, and other instances are completely unaware.
Thank you for putting in this amount of effort highlighting some shortcomings of the Fediverse
It simply can’t really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I’m not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).
Mastodon needs to implement group support, you can follow the issue here (don’t get your hopes up though).
Group support would fix it for Lemmy, but it doesn’t fully fix the problem as I see it with this way of sharing the Like objects. For toots outside of any group (in Lemmy terms: comments/posts outside a community), presumably it would continue to function like this, i.e. only the receiving instance is aware of the Like. This still encourages centralization if you ask me.
Can we all at least agree that “toots” is a terrible sounding term? It sounds like what happens when one of the powerpuff girls farts. She toots.
I’m not a native speaker so I don’t hear the fart association so much. But isn’t tooting also just what a trumpet or elephant does? In that way it makes sense. But I do think the terminology is a bit silly. Why not just “post” instead of toot? Why not just “repost” or “share” instead of “boost”? It feels a bit too much like corporate social media where every feature needs a “wacky and fun” name.
A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent “toot” (Mastodon’s equivalent of tweet).
Wait, back up… Mastodon calls these “toots”? So, everybody is posting farts?
Unless lemmy devs have changed something since last year, this shouldn’t be the case, there’s a bug in there.
All interactions are recived by the instance hosting the community, and that instance is responsible for broadcasting that interaction to each instance where a user subscribed to it is hosted.
So, mastodon is only responsible for sending the upvote to feddit.dk and then feddit.dk to all other instances.All interactions are recived by the instance hosting the community
Exactly - but Mastodon doesn’t do it like that. Mastodon sends the upvote directly to the instance with the user receiving the Like. So the community never sees the Like at all. So this is Mastodon not supporting groups, it is not a bug in Lemmy.
Ohhh! Now I understand!
Yeah, then that’s an issue on mastodon.
I mentioned some time ago, the fact that mastodon and Lemmy use the same protocol is annoying, because the experiences are different, so it causes a lot of issues :/
Can’t even see these posts, I clicked and got:
400 {“error”:“couldnt_find_post”}
Weird, what client are you using?
Browser. I’m on feddit.nl and use Photon as UI on it (ph.feddit.nl).
Interesting. Seems like Photon attempts to do some kind of clever (and entirely non-standard) hack and tries to load the comment from your own instance? But obviously you need to see it from Feddit.dk to see the votes. This is a bug with Photon I would say.
I found the bug, and i fixed it. (btw, ph.feddit.nl is out of date)
Is this a bug? Sounds like a feature of decentralization.
Mastodon doesn’t support groups so it’s maybe not a “bug” per se, but it is at least a missing feature.
Consider also that if Lemmy shared upvotes the same way, you would only see the upvotes on posts from your own instance, i.e. upvotes would only appear on the local feed. The all feed would be pointless and in general it would be pointless to try to sort posts across the whole fediverse, as you only receive upvotes for your local posts.
Lemmy simply would not function if it shared votes like that. So in that sense, it’s a bug kind of. And as mentioned above, I think it’s a bad way of doing it, as it encourages centralization.
Interesting. This explains why posts never seem to have more than a few likes on the small Mastodon instance I use. I have to say I’m not a fan.
Yep exactly, it also leads to Mastodon instances only seeing local likes for remote posts. You’ll never see remote likes on remote posts as they wouldn’t be sent to your instance. I honestly don’t understand how this hasn’t been a bigger problem for Mastodon, but I guess Mastodon is more about boosts and chronological timelines and less about sorting stuff based on likes.
It causes people to wander off as they think theres not enough interactions compared to other social media. The first comment you linked shows only 141 points to me.
