I think if this gets added it should clearly mark which comment is for which community, or put them as separate blocks of comments entirely. Otherwise it could get confusing when different communities have different contexts.
It just occurred to me that crossposts sometimes have different body texts and the comments could be in the context of that, and even if we disregard the comments altogether, you might still wanna read the body text. The convenience of having all comments grouped together would mean that no one will go check each crosspost and read its body text, how would you know that there is one anyway?
Maybe there could be a button that shows the body text of each crosspost, either as a popup or a collapsible block
Off topic, but the new list of crossposts looks really good!
Back on topic, I think the way PieFed does it looks really good.
IMO, yes. I think it would make people more, rather than less, inclined to comment on a cross-post made in a smaller communities, since then their comment would be more visible.
The main concern I can see being raised is potentially leading to brigading? I’m not sure if that’s much of an issue on Lemmy and I would assume being able to de-federate would mitigate that substantially.
System should be designed without credence given to abusers and the abusers dealt with later.
Brigading and insincere engagement should be dealt with by another system, rather than disempowering the users (in this case it would be restraining their reach)
If we build system with the actions of abusers, then we end up building prisons instead.
Completely agree with you.
Yes!
Hmm had an error loading the full post in Piefed even tho I posted in it. But yes I think that showing all the comments to a link across instances like how piefed and many clients do is great and makes the place feel more lively
Piefed’s implementation of this idea is a good place to start imo
Comments from crossposts are organized into sections according to each community and you can easily read a community’s sidebar by clicking on the icon next to it (red arrows). I think those sections should be collapsed by default, this way it would be harder for users not to notice that these are comments from a different community.
Here is something to consider, sometimes one link is posted multiple times to the same community, how would you deal with that?
Edit: When a user wants to reply to a comment from a crosspost there should be a reminder/indicator that this is a comment from a different community or something.
Is this something communities could opt out of? Not everyone wants their community flooded with comments from people replying to people who aren’t even community members.
I could see a user setting for this being a good idea. With a default being whatever the consensus ends up being.
In this case you have to be posted AS A crosspost to take effect, and any one of the cross posted community can just delete the post, or presumably uncrosspost it.
The problem usually is that, nobody bother interacting with small communities and aggregate around the “one big community” for that topic.
Small community who would want to remain insular have lots of ways of disappearing further if they want to, but that’s never the actual problem of small communities. It is always easier to have less reach and become less relevant than the opposite which better crossposts enable.
EDIT: After reading through the Git issue and the other comments in this thread, it is not very clear to me what “combining comments from cross-posts on the post screen” means. I understood it at first to mean that you will pool all comments together and show all of them in all cross-posts, but now I am not so sure. Still, in general terms, I think that mechanisms to share activity with niche communities are good
I would say yes, there are cases in which I have thought that this would be a nice thing to have. Especially when cross-posting to a smaller niche community.
I can think of a few potential small issues. For example, cross-posters can edit the body of the message, so you might in some cases end up with comments that seem out of place as they refer to the content specific to a cross-post. You also have the rare case in which the same post might mean different things in different communities.
But, overall, I see it as beneficial. Quirks can be fine-tuned later on.
I like the way piefed does it. Have visual separation letting people know where the comment will go.
It would be nice for Lemmy too.
And if we get this, this is something even reddit doesn’t have. A killer feature.
I think it would be a good idea, especially if it’s configurable. Currently, threads on most posts tend to be fairly small, and combining them could help lead to more lively discussions.
No. It’s confusing. Maybe make them easily accessible though but still distinct so that the users know it’s two different spaces.
The problem is that then people only post in the “one big community” and this neuters the decentralization aspects of Lemmy and fragments the lemmy community as a whole.
I think this is a great compromise where communities remain distinct and granular, but we get a common discussion space for all by default
I made this suggestion recently. Have you seen the Piefed implementation though? You can see an example of it here.
I think this would be visually overwhelming
Here is how I suggested this be presented
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3827#issuecomment-3201567252
I made the same suggestion recently lol.
Great !! It means we’re not alone in recognizing the danger of concentrating power in the hands of a few instance owners and operators of the “one big community”
I wonder if this could become a side bar element.
Or for the new crosspost display to be collpased by default.
And how much space would this take on mobile?
If so, then to which specific instance(s) (or more precisely, local mirrors of instances) would replies be sent?
This is no different from viewing all, going to a federated community, and replying to comments there. This changes nothing about federation.
Would defederated users be able to see and participate?
This doesn’t change anything about existing federation; you can even have crossposts in the same server or even the same community (like a historical link).
Oh okay. I think it’s a good idea, either way.
Yes by default, though it should be possible to post without joining the wider discussion, imagine (whatever you think about them) “shit X says” metacommunities’ discussion getting mixed in with the sincere commenters
Here is a reference to what that looks like.
I’m not sure how much I like the presentation here. Another option would be to have tabs between the sorting options and the comments.
If you want to combat people only contributing to the most active thread, maybe sort each instance’s comments by total comments ascending?
If you wanted to leave a top-level comment in the other thread from the view you were in, you could do like a Window Shade type UI where each comment section is contained in a box with a clickable header. Clicking the header collapses the shade, leaving only the header. Kind of like collapsing a comment. The other thread comments could be under the primary thread comments and collapsed (or auto-expanded; maybe that’s a UI setting). Like this:
Comment Thread 1 (12 Comments) (community-a) Comment 1 Comment 2 Comment 3 Comment Thread 2 (12 Comments) (community-c) Comment Thread 3 (12 Comments) (community-d) Comment Thread 4 (12 Comments) (community-e) It’s awkward for me because the comment feed feels very segmented. It’s awkward to have a big header for a smaller/niche instance and one comment below it.
It makes that comment seem like an orphan and gives prominence to people who use the biggest instance.
I’d also want the sort I apply (Hot/New/etc) to apply to every comment, not per instance.
I’d propose something like this.
Clicking on the Server dropdown could be a simple checkbox group, which would remember your configuration across that instance. That way, if you wanted to hide specific communities from appearing, you could.
Your proposal might be more visually appealing in certain cases but there is no clear visual explanation of what is going on. New users and people browsing without an account wouldn’t intuitively understand that these are comments from crossposts in federated instances (what does any of this mean?)
I don’t think normies care, and i believe essentially it doesn’t matter.
But I haven’t done any research or spoken to any users, so I’m just going off instincts.
Happy to be proven wrong. I’m not a fediverse expert.
each comment section is contained in a box with a clickable header. Clicking the header collapses the shade, leaving only the header. Kind of like collapsing a comment.
I was just suggesting this but in general.
