I feel like people are complaining about wrong thing. At least for me it’s not a problem that there are different communities. To me problem is same posts. What would be great is to have same posts merged into one post with comments from all its duplicates. This way communities are independent, lemmings don’t get to scroll same copy-pasta and discussion of same thing is visible cross communities/instances. Question is how we define “same” is it carbon copy of post, or same content only? Alternative titles can be shown if content is same but not title.
You should also be careful with merging posts if they’re in communities with a very different comment culture. Like, merging a pro-thing and an anti-thing post isn’t going to make anyone happy. Or merging one on a meme community and one with tightly enforced rules.
I think each title/post of the same content should be treated as its own top-level object in the comments section, so collapsing everything at the top level would show you all the posts and reposts from various communities.
On client side, you should be able to merge all the posts, to sort all top level comments together. But if you go to make a top level comment, you’ll need to be replying to a specific post from a specific community (selectable, but defaults to the title you were shown from outside the post).
From outside the post, I think it would be cool to be able to browse the various posts of the same content from different communities, seeing their titles, the name of the community/instance, the number of comments.
Just my initial thoughts. Mainly, I just think it’s cool that we’re talking about this issue at all because once we solve this kind of problem in all its forms and iterations, we could see some really cool decentralized communities start to coalesce. IMO, the next big step after this would be building systems a user could use to find instances and communities they’re not yet aware of.
I feel like people are complaining about wrong thing. At least for me it’s not a problem that there are different communities. To me problem is same posts. What would be great is to have same posts merged into one post with comments from all its duplicates. This way communities are independent, lemmings don’t get to scroll same copy-pasta and discussion of same thing is visible cross communities/instances. Question is how we define “same” is it carbon copy of post, or same content only? Alternative titles can be shown if content is same but not title.
You should also be careful with merging posts if they’re in communities with a very different comment culture. Like, merging a pro-thing and an anti-thing post isn’t going to make anyone happy. Or merging one on a meme community and one with tightly enforced rules.
I think each title/post of the same content should be treated as its own top-level object in the comments section, so collapsing everything at the top level would show you all the posts and reposts from various communities.
On client side, you should be able to merge all the posts, to sort all top level comments together. But if you go to make a top level comment, you’ll need to be replying to a specific post from a specific community (selectable, but defaults to the title you were shown from outside the post).
From outside the post, I think it would be cool to be able to browse the various posts of the same content from different communities, seeing their titles, the name of the community/instance, the number of comments.
Just my initial thoughts. Mainly, I just think it’s cool that we’re talking about this issue at all because once we solve this kind of problem in all its forms and iterations, we could see some really cool decentralized communities start to coalesce. IMO, the next big step after this would be building systems a user could use to find instances and communities they’re not yet aware of.
The Summit app has a setting to automatically mark duplicate posts as read, but I can’t vouch for how well it works since I don’t use it much.
Point being, though, it’s definitely doable! At least on the client side.
The only issue I can see with that is you missing comments from more active threads?
Possibly. But they’re only marked as read, so if you’re not constantly hitting the “hide read” button you’ll still see the posts.
Plus, by default I’m pretty sure Lemmy feeds are sorted by Hot, so the more active threads will be the first one you see anyways.