It would be awesome, this is probably the most important issue Lemmy is facing.
Maybe community moderators could decide to defederate with certain other communities if they believe that the moderation there is not up to snuff.
Or maybe community moderators could moderate the combined comment section of what people can see on their own communities, even when it is posted on other communities, but not remove comments or ban people from those other communities.
Honestly, a bit of experimentation might just be necessary to see what works, but I think we definitely need a way to combine posts which are redundant.
IMO, yes. I think it would make people more, rather than less, inclined to comment on a cross-post made in a smaller communities, since then their comment would be more visible.
The main concern I can see being raised is potentially leading to brigading? I’m not sure if that’s much of an issue on Lemmy and I would assume being able to de-federate would mitigate that substantially.
Completely agree with you.
System should be designed without credence given to abusers and the abusers dealt with later.
Brigading and insincere engagement should be dealt with by another system, rather than disempowering the users (in this case it would be restraining their reach)
If we build system with the actions of abusers, then we end up building prisons instead.
What i am worried about is that the federation system is already kinda hard to understand. New users who are not hardcore fediverse nerds (Like me and probably the rest of the people answering this post). Could start thinking “what the hell is going on?!” and might think lemmy is obtuse and drop it.
Lemmy could at some point benefit from a UX study where new users volunteer to be observed while the software is first use (software companies sometimes do that). maybe that could verify there are no problems . adding a searchable FAQ and a introductory tutorial (saying something "this will take about 5/10/15 minutes) could help.
Yes please. Also can you make communities like “tags” when cross posting. Often a post belongs in multiple communities.
I think if this gets added it should clearly mark which comment is for which community, or put them as separate blocks of comments entirely. Otherwise it could get confusing when different communities have different contexts.
Yes, these would be in clearly marked, distinct sections, so its clear what community they were cross-posted to.
It just occurred to me that crossposts sometimes have different body texts and the comments could be in the context of that, and even if we disregard the comments altogether, you might still wanna read the body text. The convenience of having all comments grouped together would mean that no one will go check each crosspost and read its body text, how would you know that there is one anyway?
Maybe there could be a button that shows the body text of each crosspost, either as a popup or a collapsible block
The overwhelming majority of cross posts are simply the link or occasionally there is a small amount of different text in the body.
Piefed’s implementation of this idea is a good place to start imo
Comments from crossposts are organized into sections according to each community and you can easily read a community’s sidebar by clicking on the icon next to it (red arrows). I think those sections should be collapsed by default, this way it would be harder for users not to notice that these are comments from a different community.
Here is something to consider, sometimes one link is posted multiple times to the same community, how would you deal with that?
Edit: When a user wants to reply to a comment from a crosspost there should be a reminder/indicator that this is a comment from a different community or something.
Yes!
Hmm had an error loading the full post in Piefed even tho I posted in it. But yes I think that showing all the comments to a link across instances like how piefed and many clients do is great and makes the place feel more lively
Hi, one of startrek.website’s admins here:
If I’m understanding this “feature” correctly, it feels antithetical to what I view as a fundamental aspect of the fediverse, which is diversity of moderation via decentralization. We came to the fediverse with the explicit purpose of escaping the tyranny of the majority that Reddit forces upon mod teams. This feels like a large step on the path to remaking reddit “with extra steps” and would probably be a deal breaker (for me personally at least).
I think a better way to implement a similar feature, is to give mods an ability to “boost” posts into their communities (with consent from the other mod team to prevent brigading). That maintains the separation while still allowing mods to make exceptions and consolidate comment threads where they deem appropriate.
Maybe admins should be able to easily block crosspost comments from specific communities or instances? So if there’s an instance with a lot of rulebreakers out there, the admin can hide them all in a quick and easy way.
Because for users this seems like a nice feature that prevents some of the at times obscene fragmentation of the discussion, which also seems antithetical to the idea of the Fediverse (a federated whole, rather than hundreds of little islands with little to no interaction between them).
Boosting posts into another community does sound cool
Is this something communities could opt out of? Not everyone wants their community flooded with comments from people replying to people who aren’t even community members.
I could see a user setting for this being a good idea. With a default being whatever the consensus ends up being.
In this case you have to be posted AS A crosspost to take effect, and any one of the cross posted community can just delete the post, or presumably uncrosspost it.
The problem usually is that, nobody bother interacting with small communities and aggregate around the “one big community” for that topic.
Small community who would want to remain insular have lots of ways of disappearing further if they want to, but that’s never the actual problem of small communities. It is always easier to have less reach and become less relevant than the opposite which better crossposts enable.
Combine posts and not just comments.
In addition to my other suggestions I think showing crossposts with their own comments would very easy to understand and no one would miss the context because the title and body text of each post would be there. Basically add a section at the end that says “Crossposts” and have a little 🛈 or � next to it that explains the whole thing, when you click on “Crossposts” it expands and shows post previews like when you’re browsing (with the + sign to see body text) and the comments appear below the preview. And this could be off by default so it wouldn’t confuse new users.
Why not implement “Communities following communities”?
Community
acan follow communityb, making posts frombalso appear ona.What this means is that community moderators can choose to have posts from other communities to show up on theirs. That means if all the pancake communities are following each other, I can post on
pancake@a.comand it would show up on the other pancake communities as well, and the comments would simply be grouped into just one post!As a practical example, imagine if your post on
games@lemmy.worldwould also show up ongames@sh.itjust.works, and people from over there will only interact with your post and not a crossposted version of it (which would separate comments).This would fix the “centralization” issue of merging communities by giving all communities the power to choose which communities to integrate with, and users would have the power to choose which instance to post on. You wouldn’t need to worry about posting or browsing the “right” community, because each community would be interconnected. Just as the Fediverse gods intended.
Of course, communities would have the freedom to choose which ones to follow. If the moderators on
pancakes@d.comdisagree withpancakes@a.com, they don’t need to follow that community and show its posts. I don’t foresee something like this happening often, though. Providing options either way is good for all sides.I think this would be a more elegant solution than combining comment sections from multiple crossposts.
You still need the mod of community a to follow community b
I got a post removed on !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world for reminding about !mechanical_keyboards@programming.dev , I don’t really see them agreeing to follow the PD community
Here is a reference to what that looks like.
I’m not sure how much I like the presentation here. Another option would be to have tabs between the sorting options and the comments.
If you want to combat people only contributing to the most active thread, maybe sort each instance’s comments by total comments ascending?
If you wanted to leave a top-level comment in the other thread from the view you were in, you could do like a Window Shade type UI where each comment section is contained in a box with a clickable header. Clicking the header collapses the shade, leaving only the header. Kind of like collapsing a comment. The other thread comments could be under the primary thread comments and collapsed (or auto-expanded; maybe that’s a UI setting). Like this:
Comment Thread 1 (12 Comments) (community-a) Comment 1 Comment 2 Comment 3 Comment Thread 2 (12 Comments) (community-c) Comment Thread 3 (12 Comments) (community-d) Comment Thread 4 (12 Comments) (community-e) It’s awkward for me because the comment feed feels very segmented. It’s awkward to have a big header for a smaller/niche instance and one comment below it.
It makes that comment seem like an orphan and gives prominence to people who use the biggest instance.
I’d also want the sort I apply (Hot/New/etc) to apply to every comment, not per instance.
I’d propose something like this.
Clicking on the Server dropdown could be a simple checkbox group, which would remember your configuration across that instance. That way, if you wanted to hide specific communities from appearing, you could.
Your proposal might be more visually appealing in certain cases but there is no clear visual explanation of what is going on. New users and people browsing without an account wouldn’t intuitively understand that these are comments from crossposts in federated instances (what does any of this mean?)
I don’t think normies care, and i believe essentially it doesn’t matter.
But I haven’t done any research or spoken to any users, so I’m just going off instincts.
Happy to be proven wrong. I’m not a fediverse expert.
each comment section is contained in a box with a clickable header. Clicking the header collapses the shade, leaving only the header. Kind of like collapsing a comment.
I was just suggesting this but in general.
I like the way piefed does it. Have visual separation letting people know where the comment will go.
It would be nice for Lemmy too.
And if we get this, this is something even reddit doesn’t have. A killer feature.
No. It’s confusing. Maybe make them easily accessible though but still distinct so that the users know it’s two different spaces.
The problem is that then people only post in the “one big community” and this neuters the decentralization aspects of Lemmy and fragments the lemmy community as a whole.
I think this is a great compromise where communities remain distinct and granular, but we get a common discussion space for all by default
The users who post in the “one big community” are the users who want their posts to get the most views. Personally speaking, I generally do not want to be a part of a community full of those kind of people (with the exception of if I have a tech support question or similar).
Not everyone wants to be in the most popular space, this “feature” essentially forces everyone together. I believe the social web thrives with a diversity of approaches to community structure.
As a user, I very much do not want a common discussion space.
Then just write in a .txt file on your computer using notepad.
You have to understand, the point of social media is to come together.
It is very easy to fragment into ever smaller group, it will NEVER be difficult to be excluded.
It simply IS NOT the problem we are discussing here.
The problem IS the fragmentation that is unavoidable when we try to decentralize.Without this Lemmy becomes Reddit with extra steps, it creates the “one big community” on the “one big server” it put all the power in the hand of whoever has the key to that instance, and just like that we’re back on reddit.
We have to be able to have a “books” lemmy community that exists accross the whole lemmy very, I want there to be 1500 books community on 1500 servers. I want anyone to be able to post on any of them and be just as likely to be seen.
Because if you don’t then, every topic on the lemmyverse will look like this
Books@lemmy.ml - 12.7K subscribers Books@lemmy.world - 6.56K subscribers Books@lemmygrad.ml - 464 subscribers Books@sh.itjust.works - 233 subscribersAnd hundreds more with less than 100 subscribers, where posting could not be seen by even 1% of 1% of 1% of users ?
This puts all the power into the Books@lemmy.ml mods and the lemmy.ml instance owner.
And worse, as these mods become more and more lazy or corrupt or just stop caring. That one big community fragments based on what becomes excluded from the “one big community”
So you end up with the second community getting filled up with toxic anti-vaxx and flat earthers, which further empowers the “one big community” because now the alternatives are total poison, the VERY IDEA of leaving becomes unthinkable.
This is the logic we are fleeing Reddit and Twitter from, this is the logic that created the horrible places like Rumble, Gab, Parler and ducking “Truth” , which become empowered by in their toxicity by the centralisation and polarization of the “one big community”
What I’m saying is that you’re basically making an “all lives matters” argument, yes it’s true but that’s just not the problem, you can make private, invite only or communities with incomprehensible and unassociable names. Nothing is stopping your leaving in the lemmy woods and never being seen again.
That is just not the problem at hand.
I made this suggestion recently. Have you seen the Piefed implementation though? You can see an example of it here.
FYI the second link is dead, here’s another example https://piefed.social/post/1261126#post_replies
I think it would be a good idea, especially if it’s configurable. Currently, threads on most posts tend to be fairly small, and combining them could help lead to more lively discussions.
