Mildly Infuriating

Firstly, not everyone uses subscriptions. A lot of people browse by /all so they end up seeing a lot of repeated content. That’s the nature of how the fediverse works.

Secondly, I don’t think calling it a repost is fair if all they’re doing is taking one link or article and posting it to all relevant communities. When I think of a repost, it’s usually someone taking old content that has been around for ages and posting it again for new users or people that missed it the first time to see. This isn’t typically what’s happening here.

Finally, I really don’t agree that blocking the posters is a good idea. If anything, you as a user should either use subscriptions, as you suggest, to cultivate what you want to see, or use the block function to block redundant communities so you only see things once. But blocking posters only means that you won’t see other relevant posts they make in the future. This isn’t a sustainable method for being able to get content that interests you, and I can’t fathom why anyone would suggest it.

Ideally I’d love to see multiple like-minded communities be able to federate their content amongst each other so that anything that gets posted to one will get federated to all of them, comments and all. And then anyone viewing one of those communities, either through a subscription or through /all would see just one instance of the post. This also has the wonderful side benefit of creating redundant servers hosting the same content which means if one server goes down the chance of content being lost is greatly lessened. Kind of like crowd sourced redundancy. Hopefully this is something that the people that are developing the platform will be able to add in the future. It will solve this problem while making the platform better for everyone at the same time. Win/win.