I don't think that this is something that should be done without the explicit, case-by-case consent of the mod teams of both communities - the one hosting the original post, and the one to which it is being cross-posted.

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.

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.

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.

Why not implement "Communities following communities"?

Community a can follow community b, making posts from b also appear on a.

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 [email protected] and 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 [email protected] would also show up on [email protected], 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 [email protected] disagree with [email protected], 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.

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.

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 please. Also can you make communities like "tags" when cross posting. Often a post belongs in multiple communities.

Yes!

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.

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.

Combine posts and not just comments.

In addition to my other suggestions I think showing crossposts with their own comments would be 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.

Off topic, but the new list of crossposts looks really good!

Back on topic, I think the way PieFed does it looks really good.

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.

EDIT: After reading through the Git issue and the other comments in this thread, it is not very clear to me what "combining comments from cross-posts on the post screen" means. I understood it at first to mean that you will pool all comments together and show all of them in all cross-posts, but now I am not so sure. Still, in general terms, I think that mechanisms to share activity with niche communities are good

I would say yes, there are cases in which I have thought that this would be a nice thing to have. Especially when cross-posting to a smaller niche community.

I can think of a few potential small issues. For example, cross-posters can edit the body of the message, so you might in some cases end up with comments that seem out of place as they refer to the content specific to a cross-post. You also have the rare case in which the same post might mean different things in different communities.

But, overall, I see it as beneficial. Quirks can be fine-tuned later on.

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)|

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.

No. It's confusing. Maybe make them easily accessible though but still distinct so that the users know it's two different spaces.

Maybe if mods from both communities agree to share comments. Some communities want to remain separate.

So if I post something in the comment of a thread that is cross posted to another Community my comments will appear in that Community as well? That sounds awful. I don't know why anyone would want that.