The two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance are on Feddit.dk, but you won't see them on your own instance
The two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance are on Feddit.dk, but you won't see them on your own instance
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.
That was a good investigation and explanation about a weird number of up votes. Thanks for explaining it.
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.
Yeah, I'm not going to defend Mastodon's frankly bizarre Like system. It's not even a privacy thing as favourites are fully public.
Its not really a "not playing well" with each other, it is just the mastodon works. That is the reason why most toots in my mastodon timeline have 0 favourites (upvotes) and only a few boosts... I don't know why they do it, because at the minimum the followers of that user should be notified about that like...
at the minimum the followers of that user should be notified about that like…
I agree - the problem is that the instance that sends the Like (on instance A) doesn't know the followers of the user receiving the Like (on instance B), because followers are not (necessarily) public. So it doesn't know which instances to send the Like to. And instance B can't forward the Like to the followers itself, because the signatures in ActivityPub are not made for that, as I explained elsewhere in the thread.
AP has a tool for that called inbox forwarding and mastodon uses it for sharing the comments under posts. It works like this: you send a reply to a user with their follower collection as the recipient. You of course cannot know who is following that user, however they than just forward this reply to the follower collection, because the server knows that it has authority over that collection. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#inbox-forwarding
Thank you for putting in this amount of effort highlighting some shortcomings of the Fediverse
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.
great post, thanks
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.
This is a bug in Lemmy. Lemmy instances hosting the comment could simply increment their internal counter when they receive the upvote from Masterdon, but not from other Lemmy instances. Then they could share this counter with other Lemmy instances and it would be consistent with the true count.
Mastodon's design decisions are well known, and it deliberately doesn't share counts or what's hot across all instances to avoid Twitter style pile ons. If Lemmy wants accurate counts or even just the same counts on multiple instances it has to correct for this behavior.
Does the receiver instance federate that like object to other instances? If not, it is shit for sure.
No, but how could it? Let's say Feddit.dk receives a Like from mastodon.social. Then Feddit.dk would have to tell the other instances that mastodon.social sent that Like. But how can Feddit.dk prove that the Like actually did come from mastodon.social, i.e. it is not just a fabricated Like that Feddit.dk made up and hid by pretending it came from mastodon.social. That's not easy.
I seriously doubt Lemmy currently does any validation whatsoever. There were communities using this blatant security issue for non-malicious purposes (see https://endlesstalk.org/c/tails@lemmon.website, which re-wrote posts from people (which is only possible if the posts weren't validated, or at least re-fetched from their origins)).
There is a way to re-share and validate remote activities, either through LD signatures (ew, JSON-LD processing :vomit:) (which only Mastodon and Misskey implement) or the newfangled FEP-8b32 Object Integrity Proofs (which nobody relevant on the microblogging space implements).
You're right, that's worse.
(mentioning people mentioned in post because post mentions apparently do not work)
Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon's ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ?
It's a good question and really we just don't know yet I think. It's very hard to predict performance of complex systems. The only way to know, is basically by measuring, and the only way to do that is if we actually had that amount of users.
Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?
Unfortunately ActivityPub has no way to "batch" activities like this.
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?
Tooting the way you’d toot a horn/trumpet, or in this case an elephant trunk.
Do people seriously not know what a freaking mammoth is?!
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.
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).
16 & 4 upvotes here on Fedia (mbin), with 0 boosts on each.
I don't understand why feddit.dk doesn't display upvotes received from Mastodon users. Why is this dependent on my instance?