Disclaimer: If this isn’t in the spirit of the community, feel free to remove the post and I’ll re-post it in my app-specific community. I’m posting it here since it’s a feature that I’m thinking through that may eventually make it into the Lemmy app I develop, and the people here would probably have good ideas/opinions on the matter. Plus, other apps may have already implemented this, and someone may helpfully point that out.

With that out of the way, I’m looking to get some feedback on whether this is a good idea or something that only sounds like a good idea.

Basically, when a post has crossposts, my idea is to fetch the comments for the other cross posts and merge them all into one big comment tree. Regardless of which cross-post you land on, you’ll see the same comments.

  • If you reply to the post (top-level comment), it’ll post to whichever cross post you’re currently on.
  • If you reply to an existing comment, it’ll go to whatever post that comment was posted to.

The goal is to bring some unity to disparate communities that have a lot of crossover content.

Is this a good idea? Dumb idea? Can anyone think of any gotchas that might crop up? If I do implement this, it will be something the user can turn on/off.

Potential issues:

  • Culture clash between different communities
  • Mods of one community would not be able to mod every item shown
  • ???

Thoughts?

  • Die4Ever
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    6 months ago

    Related: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2012

    I think the devs want comments to be specific to the community in order to retain the culture of each community.

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4225#issuecomment-1904443026

    Combining comments is out, because these are different posts that live on different communities, each with their own members and mod policies.

    Lemmy-ui already has a “post-deduplicator” that simplifies viewing cross-posts on the same page, that should probably be replicated in a lot of UIs. But that seems to me the best way to handle it.

    This comment is another way to explain the issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4225#issuecomment-1837522660

    This would be a bad user experience for certain communities. Imagine the same news article is posted in /c/cars and /c/fuckcars. It is not desired nor expected to have all comments combined.

    But I do think there may be some room for combined comments, like when Lemmy has a method to group communities, maybe those comments could be combined from the grouped communities.