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.
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.
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.
That circumstance with the anime communities wasn’t something I’d considered.
For collapsed comments sections, h3ndrik was working on something like that. A screencast demo is available here: https://codeberg.org/attachments/877f5176-8eb1-4f36-bf38-0abf9a1c8bc7. That’s an early implementation - just to give you an idea - he improved on it later.
What I wanted to do was have ‘direct’ and ‘all’ views for the comments in a post. It would look a bit like: https://codeberg.org/attachments/d11f18c6-a10a-4dbf-a883-555705780608. The idea was that ‘default comment view’ could be option, like ‘default comment sort’ should be (one day), but it looks like choosing ‘all’ would have to be a careful choice as a default (e.g. when there’s a TV show on you don’t want spoiled)
Taking a look at those two paradigms, I think I prefer the collapsed comment sections. Different communities/instances can have very different moderation policies or standards of discourse, so allowing users to segregate the comment sections like that would be helpful. Having all the comments from the different crossposts is definitely nice, and a step up from the way lemmy handles crossposts.
A special case might be if there are crossposts within the same community. In one of the communities I mod, there are recurring posts where the same lead image is used, so they are automatically detected as crossposts in lemmy even though weeks have elapsed since the last time it was posted. Not sure if something like this should be handled differently or not.
I don’t like the idea to combine the posts, I thought we basically already have this functionality for things which point to the same link:
My idea was very simple, if we have a list of articles from the database and we go through them to show them, instead of render a second one which is marked as a cross-post (either same link or some flag) then we show this icon in the first instance of it in the list.
Then you can click on this icon like now to show the instances of this cross posted post and they are still compleatly seperated in any other way other than in the listing.
