I’ve been thinking about how great this feature would be. I don’t know how Lemmy’s codebase could handle it, but this just makes sense to me and would solve the big issue of community fragmentation.

In general the idea is that when you open the comments section of a given post, it should fetch all other comments from crossposts (ones with the same link). Since Lemmy already keeps track of crossposts by linking to their threads, it’s just a matter of fetching those comments and showing them in conjunction with the comments in this community. When you reply to a comment that’s federated from another community, your reply will go over there.

Also, from what I understand, copies of posts and comments are stored in the instance’s local database, so it shouldn’t be very expensive to fetch these comments from different posts, right?

How viable would something like this be? Are the Lemmy devs considering something like this?

  • @meanmon13English
    6•1 year ago

    This wouldn’t work or make sense for cross posts in communities to have discussions specific to that community.

    For example I run the [email protected] community. If a post from there is cross-posted in [email protected] their discussions about the coin would be different (focused around numismatic interests as opposed to cleaning focused discussion). It wouldn’t make sense for the comments to be merged.

  • @ScrewtheholeEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    If lemmy stays small, very. On reddit, I liked being able to discuss it inside the boundaries of one community or the other. But reddit was so huge, splitting things up was good. Here, it’s bad. So yes it’s a nice idea.

    • return 0;English
      5•1 year ago

      it’d make sense if it was optional for the person making a crosspost.

      sometimes you’d want the crosspost and original to be linked because the audiences are similar (say, crossposting a speedrun for a game to both that games community and the speedrun community), and sometimes you’d want them to be separated (say, crossposting something to a BestOf style community)

  • @Windex007English
    2•1 year ago

    I think the part that you need to think through carefully is how moderation policies may differ between communities or even instances. And there are a ton of reasons you might want to not subject users by default to comments from another (eg, a community aimed at a topic with “PG” comment moderation mixing with a similar community that is targeted more towards adults).

    So, keeping in mind that the “social contract” of allowing community members to remain protected by the community rules that they signed up for should be something that can be preserved.

    Not out of reach, though. Opt-in to per community xposts. Filter out by first non-allowed-community comment per comment thread. For sure do-able.

    Just important to consider why we have communities in the first place and to consider the different types of stakeholders.

    • @simpleOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Good point, I can see how something like this could cause some shock especially in political posts. Having it be opt-in and choosing the communities to connect with would definitely be great.