It’s too fractured, posts in one community on one instance have separate comments and interaction to the same post in the same community on another instance, even if you use crossposts properly, and it clutters up your feed with multiple of the same post
This is a big one. Its probably doomed to imperfection and hold out Mods who don’t want to do it but I think some kind of Community Sync option would be huge.
One problem is that the API call that returns the feed doesn’t provide crosspost information (unless that’s changed in 0.19.4+ since i’m still developing against 0.19.3).
Crossposts in the feed have to be done client side, and you can only “roll up” ones that have the same URL (Tesseract can optionally roll up on identical titles if there’s no URL). However, that’s limited to just the ones that come through in the same fetch (unless you store all posts locally, which is something I’m considering in the future for offline support; most apps don’t).
The API call that populates the /post page does provide that crosspost data, and I’ve thought about making an option to combine the comments from each into one “megapost”. But there are a few problems with that:
Officially, crossposts are only compared against the URL. The crossposts may have different titles, and one or both may have different text in the post bodies. Which do you display?
Culture clashes. Let’s say there’s an article posted called “Ford Releases Their New Monstrosity 5000”. It gets posted to c/cars and c/fuckcars by different people with different intentions.
The tone of the comments would be wildly different since the two communities are basically ideologically opposites. The replies to comments that came in from c/fuckcars would be responding to car enthusiasts from c/cars and vice-versa. It would basically be a form of soft brigading.
It would be confusing for moderators to have multiple communities’ comments in the same post. What flies in one may violate a rule in another. Mods would only be able to take action against those in their community and not all.
I’ve wanted to do a feature like that for a while now, but every time I’ve tried to plan it out, it always seems like it would just make things worse. Even with indicators as to which community the comment came from, it’s still not ideal.
What the hell I didn’t even know this existed.
I just chose all posts and thought I was seeing the aggregate content from every instance. Also,
Seeing the usernames (with different instances on it), it made me believe everyone’s interactions are saved and visible.
Posts within the same community are synced and you can see communities from different instances. The point is that news@instance1 and news@instance2 are different communities even though the names are similar.
The counter argument is that reddit has the same problem even without federation. /r/games, /r/gaming and /r/gamers are three different subreddits with very similar names and you have no way of knowing which one is the “main” gaming community unless you check each of them. With time, this will probably sort itself out with lemmy as well. It just takes time for one of the similar communities to become the de facto standard.
Not sure why the posters on LW want to keep those active when the alternatives are more popular (e.g. !showsandmovies@lemm.ee has 2.4k monthly active users, !television@lemmy.world has 1k), and LW centralization is causing federation issues with aussie.zone but that’s why they are both kept alive.
It’s too fractured, posts in one community on one instance have separate comments and interaction to the same post in the same community on another instance, even if you use crossposts properly, and it clutters up your feed with multiple of the same post
This is a big one. Its probably doomed to imperfection and hold out Mods who don’t want to do it but I think some kind of Community Sync option would be huge.
One problem is that the API call that returns the feed doesn’t provide crosspost information (unless that’s changed in 0.19.4+ since i’m still developing against 0.19.3).
Crossposts in the feed have to be done client side, and you can only “roll up” ones that have the same URL (Tesseract can optionally roll up on identical titles if there’s no URL). However, that’s limited to just the ones that come through in the same fetch (unless you store all posts locally, which is something I’m considering in the future for offline support; most apps don’t).
The API call that populates the
/postpage does provide that crosspost data, and I’ve thought about making an option to combine the comments from each into one “megapost”. But there are a few problems with that:Officially, crossposts are only compared against the URL. The crossposts may have different titles, and one or both may have different text in the post bodies. Which do you display?
Culture clashes. Let’s say there’s an article posted called “Ford Releases Their New Monstrosity 5000”. It gets posted to
c/carsandc/fuckcarsby different people with different intentions.The tone of the comments would be wildly different since the two communities are basically ideologically opposites. The replies to comments that came in from
c/fuckcarswould be responding to car enthusiasts fromc/carsand vice-versa. It would basically be a form of soft brigading.I’ve wanted to do a feature like that for a while now, but every time I’ve tried to plan it out, it always seems like it would just make things worse. Even with indicators as to which community the comment came from, it’s still not ideal.
Reddit has the same issue. People will post an article in like 6, somewhat related subreddits and the feed would be quite repetitive.
What the hell I didn’t even know this existed. I just chose all posts and thought I was seeing the aggregate content from every instance. Also, Seeing the usernames (with different instances on it), it made me believe everyone’s interactions are saved and visible.
Posts within the same community are synced and you can see communities from different instances. The point is that news@instance1 and news@instance2 are different communities even though the names are similar.
The counter argument is that reddit has the same problem even without federation. /r/games, /r/gaming and /r/gamers are three different subreddits with very similar names and you have no way of knowing which one is the “main” gaming community unless you check each of them. With time, this will probably sort itself out with lemmy as well. It just takes time for one of the similar communities to become the de facto standard.
That usually happens when there’s a LW world community and then the alternative
Not sure why the posters on LW want to keep those active when the alternatives are more popular (e.g. !showsandmovies@lemm.ee has 2.4k monthly active users, !television@lemmy.world has 1k), and LW centralization is causing federation issues with aussie.zone but that’s why they are both kept alive.