6d ago

Lemmy app that merges comments for the same article URL?

When scrolling all it's common to see the same article posted several times, each from a different community and most with zero comments.

Is there an app that will recognise the post URLs, show that post only once in the scroll but display all the comments, perhaps with each having the community name prepended?

I usually only read the comments so there's a lot of useless scrolling if skipping zero comment posts.

Alternatively, a filter that only shows posts with comments.

25 comments

Grand idea! I thought about this as well but a year ago nothing was there. Let's hope some hero comes to our aid!

Feel free to call out communities who should be consolidated.
That's probably the best option we have at the moment.
- Yes but consolidation defeats the point of federation. I'm hoping one day Lemmy will auto-combine communities based on tags or something.
  
  Yes but consolidation defeats the point of federation.
  Only if all the communities consolidate to the same instance. Consolidation to a diverse set of instances strengthens the fediverse.
- There are many games@ and gaming@ communities lol
  I haven't tried comparing their activity levels recently, I'm just subscribed to a bunch.
  
  I prefer !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
  !games@lemmy.world and !games@sh.itjust.works are too news focused for me

Mbin automatically groups posts from multiple communities with the same link. But that requires a full instance change for most.
- Insurance change?
  
  Instance*, my bad!

Multi-communities in one form or another with this sort of functionality is sorely needed to be honest, whether from an app or (ideally) from Lemmy itself. But I suppose it's not trivial to implement.

Would be cool.
I think there's a lot of stuff you can do if you think a bit differently about Lemmy when you create an app.
There's no real reason why you should treat each instance as separate entities.
- each instance as separate entities.
  Different mods
  Different community rules
  Different audiences
  On the other hand, I agree that two similar communities should be merged
  
  It shouldnt be too hard to implement something that directs reports to the correct mod/instance despite showing up in a mixed feed.

Dunno but I think LemmyNSFW.com drops dups from the instance maybe even the broader. I doubt any combine comments but maybe a front end wizard has done it

i've thought for a while now that lemmy's consolidating feature should have been tags rather than communities. that way posts from every server with the same tag would be in the same group, and cross-posts would have the same id so users could filter out duplicates and comments would be visible from every tag.

There used to be an app called Loom that was in beta. It allowed you to create custom feeds of specific communities you want to see all together. Unfortunately the beta expired and I haven't heard from it since. Hopefully someone comes up with a similar app in the future.

I wish this were a thing

Mlem dev here.
This feature, as suggested, presents a fundamental technical problem: frontend clients load posts a page at a time, and so are only aware of the posts you’ve already scrolled past and the ~20-50 posts ahead in the feed. It’s therefore not possible to find all posts with the same URL and aggregate their comments into a single chain under the first occurrence of the URL, at least not without loading infeasible amounts of data ahead of time.
We do have a merged crossposts feature planned, which achieves the same basic functionality but using the backend crosspost data rather than absolute URLs; our comments view also currently shows the list of crossposts and indicates the number of comments on each one.
Alternatively, a filter that only shows posts with comments
That’s a good idea, we’ll add it to a future build.
- It’s therefore not possible to find all posts with the same URL
  The default web interface for Lemmy does list other communities a URL was posted to (even if not crossposted), though I'm not sure how it does this. Might there be some way to tap into that system?
  
  Do you have an example of a post where lemmy-ui does this? I’d love to look into how they implement it but I can’t find an example of the feature in action.

25 comments