I understand that cross posting is not always desirable, but it has it’s benefits also. You can find new communities, you can easily post a post which someone else posted into a more appropriate community where more people will be able to read it. For that it would be nice to consolidate cross posted posts in the view so they don’t show up over and over again but also have a way to cross post in a simpler way.
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I had a PR for this, but it started to sprawl too much, and became unwieldy.
It’s easy to drop duplicate posts from a feed, but the remaining posts need some way to indicate that there’s activity in a post that’s been hidden.
Likewise, it’s easy to dump all the comments from the different posts into one, but then the fact that it’s a technical solution to a user problem becomes apparent - the individual rules of each community clearly didn’t matter to the person spamming the same across article across multiples of them, but they suddenly become relevant when handling to potential replies.
It felt like I was stuck in a loop - until I knew what to do with posts, I couldn’t do anything with comments, and until I knew what to do with comments, I couldn’t do anything with posts. It’s a problem that needs logically separating out - which could then include new topics, like what the criteria for a cross post should be - but I found it difficult because everything seemed so inter-related.
Combining comments into one comment section from crossposts could be an issue in some circumstances. An example from the communities I am most familiar with (ani.social communities primarily):
There was recently a show airing this past fall season called Dan Da Dan. Users created a community to host episode discussion threads, !dandadan@ani.social. However, to try to separate spoilery discussion among those that have read the source material, a source reader community was made, !dandadumber@ani.social. When an episode aired each week, a discussion thread was made in each community and they both linked to the same poster image of the show. So, they would show up as crossposts. However, if the comments were combined, then the spoiler-filled discussion would be mixed in with the spoiler-free comments.
Writing this out, I guess you might be able to segregate the different comment sections in some way to help avoid this. Comments from the crossposted communities might start collapsed in their own section, similar to the current reply page. So, imagine dividers like this that say things like “Comments from !technology@lemmy.world”, “Comments from !technology@lemmy.zip”, etc.
Yeah this is not an easy one.
I think we need another layer of abstraction - rather than show a list of Posts we show a list of Timeline objects. A timeline object could be a group of posts or a single post or a mastodon post and it would render differently depending on it’s contents. Something like that.
