Fediverse projects are maturing and adoption of them is trending up. I’m excited for the further development of the underlying technologies as well as the apps being built to leverage those technologies into even more integrated, user-friendly experiences.
With any developing tech, small annoyances are found and ultimately patched or worked around. It’s to be expected that no user experience is ever perfect, even for matured ecosystems. Typically, some smaller annoyances are tolerated when balanced with the overall utility and usefulness of the tech.
One of the issues I’ve noticed (and I’m sure I’m not the first or only), is that when posts are relevant enough that the OP decides to cross-post into multiple communities, the comments and engagement stays with each community post leading to separate conversations.
The existance of separate conversations itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe you post a recipe for Pot Roast in a general cooking community and also a community that helps refine recipes to improve them. It may be that the two separate conversations make more sense as the nature of discourse is focused on two different aspects of the content posted. If they were combined, it would be more difficult to sift through chatter to get at the discussion you were looking for.
This concept is true for different communities as well as different instances. Maybe the Pot Roast recipe conversation generated on carnivores(at)lemmy.instance is substantly different from the conversation at vegan-curious(at)lemmy.instance and the existance of both is bolstered by the cultures and seneabilities of the different instance/communities. That could create usefull and/or thoughtful discourse that maybe wouldn’t have happened if everyone was mixed together and talking past each other.
However, there are plenty of informative posts attached to very similar communities on a given instance as well as posted to mirror-communities across separate instances. Each individual post is a separate entity and i find myself jumping in to different conversations of the same content to see what’s being said in each. In addition to general replies often asking the same questions across all of the posts, unique engagement is diffuse and not connecting.
I imagine that an OP would have trouble keeping up with all of these different interactions and likely defaulting to paying their attention to only one or two while the remaining posts are left to fend for themselves. Even if the OP stayed on top of them all, I assume they’d often have to answer the same questions multiple times.
_The question I pose is: _
What is the solution to myriad and diffuse conversations around cross-posts? Is there a way to handle this situation thru lemmy-ettiquette or does it require a technological solution?
Maybe we handle it thru culture and expectation. If the decided upon method was to post once and then link that post to other communities for exposure, maybe that funnels everyone into one post to interact (when that’s what OP wants).
Is there a software solution on the app developer level that combines like posts together? Is it a protocol level solution thats required? Maybe something that allows a single post to essentially ‘tag’ different communities for exposure, while only posting once? Can we associate posts to an individual user rather than associating the post to a community, so all replies come to the user post rather than in a community?
I don’t know what the solution looks like and I’m not savvy enough to understand the protocol/software side to know if any of my examples are realistic. I also don’t know if this is an issue for anyone else, or at least one that lemmy-ites actuallly care about enough to try and solve.
Does anyone know if work is being done to address this? Am I focusing on something that is simply not a priority? I welcome your thoughts.
…I tried to choose what I thought was the best place for this post, but I’m open to moving it if I was in error. (Ironically, something that might be easier if posts were handled differently). :)
_edited to make the community examples formatted as from the same instance instead of two separate instances _
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Piefed groups comment boxes from crossposts into one post. So no matter which crosspost you’re looking at, you’ll see all responses.
Different conversations in different moods and cultures on the same subject are something completely human and normal, and tech should not work to undo this. When we have seen tech undo this is with social media silos, after all.
Which is to say, any “solution” that integrates those conversations into one view should be, where possible, client-side only. That way I can opt in to view some conversations as unified or not, depending on eg.: how well do I know the context, or whether the OP is a person known for cross-posting (and to where), while at the same time not forcing everyone else to have their culture of conversation subsumed into essentially an attempt to make topical subreddits.
This is also how I feel.
Getting different perspectives from different circles instead of being migrated to one dominant website culture is a big part of why I haven’t moved to piefed, since it seems like that semi-forced centralization is part of their vision.
Agree. Piefed doesn’t give me much confidence with their “centrist-esque” more-centralized-than-not, and actually has lost some in my eyes since the creator has specifically pushed code for antagonizing one specific member of the community for the sin of [checks papers] behaving in a quirkier way than the average.
Haven’t tested piefed myself (laaaaazy here) but it doesn’t hit me much as more-centralized-than-not compared to, say, kbin (mbin now?) offering a sorta similar perspective. Am I missing out on something?
I don’t get how you think its centralised here. What code are you referring to?
There was a commit posted in another thread by the creator where they specifically substitute thorns (þ) to spite a member of the community who uses them.
I don’t know what “substitute thorns (th) to spite a member of the community who uses them” means here
Getting different perspectives from different circles instead of being migrated to one dominant website culture is a big part of why I haven’t moved to piefed, since it seems like that semi-forced centralization is part of their vision.
Have you used Piefed and its multi-community comment system? I am asking because from using it, I don’t the impression of “being migrated to one dominant website culture”.
What if a post was its own separate thing, detached from the communities. You then “attach” the post to one or more communities.
When a user comments on a post, the comment “comes from community xyz” but all comments are attached to the post not the community.
Lemmy applications can choose to filter comments from one or more communities or show them all.
This would mean a fundamental change to how both Lemmy and Piefed work.
From what I recall, I believe that Reddit handles crossposts in a similar manner, that is, comments in one crosspost in one subreddit don’t show in other crossposted subreddits.
Like Blaze mentioned in another comment, one of the problems with putting all the comments together is that different communities have different rules, so a comment that would be fine in one community might get you in trouble in a different community. People already get confused by this as it is. If all the comments from different crossposts get aggregated in one place, I think it would cause complete confusion and more work for mods.
If the OP had a mechanism to opt-in to aggregated comments, rather than individual community comments, there could be an identifying notice that the comments of that post were being “hosted” in whichever community on whichever instance and were governed by their rules. Essentially, commenters would be guests in that forum and be expected to comport themselves accordingly. I don’t think it needs to be complicated for mod teams.
Piefed splits up the comment boxes based on community when a thread is crossposted, so you can still distinguish between the comment boxes on different communities despite them being visible.
That said, a potential future option here would be a community opt-out of crosspost functionality in this way
opt-out
Shouldn’t it be the reverse? That communities opt-in into this feature? It’s 2025 we all know opt-out by default is bad.
Crossposting visibility is a pretty normal tool that should be on by default. It helps communities grow.
Good to know, thanks! Also, good idea on the opt-out.
What about making crossposts look like a quote post? Reddit already does that.
The solution has been, for decades, to dump the WWW and continue the Memex-Dynabook-Xanadu line of development where everything related is webbed together by default.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
(long story)What I think would be interesting would be to have communities be tags rather than exclusive categories. So if you make a post, you can add more than one tag to it, provided you are a ‘member’ of those tags.
Tags would have moderators much like communities have moderators now, to preserve the meaning of the tag. So you could have a tag like ‘billionaire media’, and members could slap that tag on all nyt, wapo, etc articles. Moderators would boot members who misapplied the tag.
Then what would be interesting would be to use the tags for searches, like ‘news’ minus ‘billiionaire media’.
Pretty significant changes from what lemmy is today, so would be either a fork of lemmy or a from scratch new program.
Nah, because if if there’s a post that’s of interest to more than one community, and I’m only in one of those, then I probably don’t want to see comments from those other communities, because they will be related to topics/aspects that I’m not here for (otherwise I’d also be subscribed to those communities).
maybe could filter the comments based on tag as well.
It’s a viable model, but it’s not the Lemmy model, because that’s a clone of the reddit model. I don’t know if that’s implemented anywhere though.
