tl;dr Mastodon users occasionally spam mentions and Lemmy (and probably Piefed) ingests them all and makes the post across all of the mentioned communities.

Sucks, right, because on the theadiverse, you're not actually able to do that so easily.

Basically, it's because Mastodon mixes mentions with addressing. Every mentioned person gets addressed, even though sometimes you don't mean for it to go into that community.

So what if Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, and NodeBB made it so that only the first matching community gets the post? We can already tell which posts come from threadiverse software and which don't (because we use audience, Mastodon doesn't.)

Just an idea, I can't speak for the other softwares.

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[–] silverpill@mitra.social 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Sucks, right, because on the theadiverse, you're not actually able to do that so easily.

Sounds like an unnecessary limitation of threadiverse software. Why limit a post to only one community? That doesn't make any sense.

The person who made the post with multiple mentions clearly did it intentionally, and I would do the same because for every topic I am interested in there are 4-5 groups on different servers.

Every mentioned person gets addressed

In most cases, this is what a user wants. Some platforms support silent mentions, though (Friendica, if I remember correctly).

hashtag / community tag soup

I think this should be viewed as a moderation problem, not a protocol problem. If you don't want to see mention soup, just limit the number of mentions per post on your instance.

[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you don't want to see mention soup, just limit the number of mentions per post on your instance.

Doesn't Mastodon require mentions though to function correctly? Imo instances should just not display leading or trailing mentions / hashtags. That should get rid of the problem without imposing limitations on Mastodon users.

Definitely agree with you on your first two points.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 2 points 1 day ago

silverpill@mitra.social isn't wrong though, in many cases the posts do mean to be posted in that community.

But it's an expressive thing. I'm able to mention a community like startrek@startrek.website and it won't be posted there, because I'm only mentioning that community.

And yes, Mastodon needs mention spam to function because otherwise people you reply to won't know they received a reply. It's ... an approach.