In the monthly server updates for lemmy.zip/piefed.zip there's a mantra that's repeated every month. I think it's wonderful and can be applied to the Fediverse as a whole.

If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give the Fediverse (Original: Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip) isn’t money, praise, or interpretive dance (although we would absolutely accept the last one). Its participation.

Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about whether water is wet or merely makes things wet. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession.
(We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)

The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.

So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:

Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.

Original post by @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip

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[–] fakir@piefed.social 4 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

I'd like to suggest removing timestamps on all comments, like you could still toggle a button to see the timestamp of a comment if you wanted to, but the timestamp shown on default doesn't serve any purpose other than tell the users how fresh or how stale the conversation is. When the conversation is say only a few hours old, many users will choose not to engage because we assume the conversation is over and there isn't any point in engaging further, so we skip altogether and move on. I can tell from my own experience I've done this more than a few times, I'm sure others have as well. When you only have a few thousand users across the world, unlike Reddit, we must preserve the freshness of the few conversations we do have so as to increase engagement from all.

[–] gigachad@piefed.social 5 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

On the other side I don't want to engage in discussions that are over. The Threadiverse is organized in a wayz where new content is favored in your feed. Of course there are discussions that stretch over a couple of days, but after, they die. And I think this is just the way it works, it is not meant to show all posts ever made in an equal way.

[–] Microw@piefed.zip 1 points 13 minutes ago

With the "active" sort, I regularly get posts on top of my feed that were originally made days or weeks ago, but still have discussions going on in the comments. I dont think thats a negative thing at all.

[–] fakir@piefed.social 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Right, they are not meant to show posts in equal manner - freshness & hotness do matter in engagement and are indeed shown higher compared to other posts and comments. But still, a few posts from last night might have only a couple of comments, but since it's already a few hours old, we don't reply or engage with it. We judge engagement by these timestamps and so removing timestamps will lift engagement on all posts & comments.

[–] gigachad@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

I guess this also has to do with user amount in general. The more users are active in the Threadiverse, the more users would engage with these posts.

[–] wjs018@piefed.social 4 points 1 hour ago

You are on PieFed, so you can always use a bit of custom css to make them go away. Pop this snippet into the custom css field of your user settings:

.comment_time {
    display: none;
}