Can Lemmy treat a crosspost like a boost? (merge threads?)
Can Lemmy treat a crosspost like a boost? (merge threads?)
As far as I know this isn't a feature that exists, but I know the protocol should make it fairly easy.
What I'm thinking is for Lemmy to basically have the option to inherit the comment thread when posting a URL to another fediverse service.
E.g. If crossposting a Lemmy thread, you get a tickbox saying "inherit comment section" or something and it makes the new thread effectively a symlink to the original.
This could also be used to bootstrap other fediverse services like pixelfed and peertube by enabling people to comment directly from their Lemmy instance.
So, there are issues with something like inheriting comment threads in a segmented moderation space like Lemmy. Cross-posting a post from one community to another means crossing... let's call them "regulatory boundaries". Comments posted in Community 1, hosted on Website X may violate the rules of Community 2, hosted on Website Y. So, what would that mean in terms of rules enforcement?
As a moderator, you can delete the comments you've inherited, but it's a lot harder to keep up when you've just gotten 50 or 100 comments dumped on you all at once. It also breaks the syncronization you seem to be looking for.
You can decide that moderators at the receiving community can't moderate the discussion, but that's just ends up seeming somewhat parasitic, and a clear and open vector for abuse.
On top of the moderation issues, it also means giving users the ability to just... inject people into a community who aren't members, both without the consent of that community, and without the consent of the people being injected in. Like, what happens if I were to cross-post something into a troll community? Suddenly, I've just exposed dozens of people -- if not more -- to a harassment ring, with two clicks of a button.
Personally, I fail to see the upsides. This really just seems like yet another way to try and paper over the fact that we're all using different websites, and to ignore the websites that we're actually using in favour of make believing that we're in the centre of the panopticon.
I think the necessity for moderators to curate the experience for the members of the community is overrated.
I've seen very selected cases where that kind of thing is done to good effect. /r/AskHistorians is the most obvious example. I've seen a whole lot of cases where there are moderators who are abusing their ability to control the conversation, going well beyond just keeping everything on the rails, and deciding for themselves what people in the comments are and aren't allowed to say.
Personally, I think merging the comments threads from multiple communities would be a clear benefit, in part specifically because it would eliminate that ability for moderators to decide how they want to shape the comments to look like.
To deal with moderation conflicts you could basically just unlink the thread.
Also we could also just add flags to activitypub messages on creating posts to tell the boosting server whether or not merging is permitted.
If you've worked hard on something and want everyone to see it, set it to True and people can boost it to different communities.
If it's something personal or an in-joke that you only want to be advertised to the community it's posted in set it to False and the option won't be available when cross posting in the UI.
The upside is that I don’t scroll down my feed and see the same post 20 times.
I get what you’re saying but surely a lot of these problems are already present. You can ban a user but they can just go create a new account on a different instance and go back to posting wherever they want.
Personally I’d like to see some kind of tracking thing so Lemmy’s aware of duplicate posts and then the client can be configured how to behave according to user preference.
Better than seeing the same exact post on six different communities one after another.
That would make sense, I'm pretty sure communities are already just actors who auto-boost posts.
It's been declined https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4225
Imagine the same news article is posted in /c/cars and /c/fuckcars. It is not desired nor expected to have all comments combined.
Making it a checkbox is an interesting idea though, but could still be confusing reading the comments with the different contexts.
This is true but the problem is seeing repeat threads on the front page. Maybe it is a stretch but would it be possible to stack the comments under each other separated by a head of which sub the comments are from
I think this would be simple ActivityPub-wise, but would be more complicated in terms of moderation and would involve some non-arbitrary decisions.
This doesn't really make sense in the Lemmy model inherited from reddit. A post belongs to a specific community, you can't put one post in multiple communities. You can crosspost, and from there you can jump to the original and see its comments, but the comments on a crosspost belong to the second community.
Maybe a crosspost should not have a second comments section, and opening it should always send you to the original post, but I don't think that's desirable. For example, if I'm banned from the first community, should I be forbidden from commenting on the post when it's crossposted to my second community?
Would be cool but i think it would be quite hard to implement