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There is a discussion (has been many discussions and for a long time) in lemmy GitHub repository about this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
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.
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.
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 feel like this should be a client-side thing.
The client-side thing is sometimes the Browser, which seems to be lemmy in itself.
I prefer the separation.
Its interesting to read 3 or 4 topics on the same thing (sometimes it’s even the same person posting to multiple instances) but getting wildly different “public opinion” depending on where it was posted and who ended up as the top comment (which tends to influence the rest of the comments).
Yeah, i have yet to see any actually good arguments for all this unification and merging talk. Do people just have some OCD stuff going or are there any real problems with the way it is right now?
Its almost zero effort to just follow multiple communities for the same stuff and there are clients that automatically hide crossposts if that annoys people.
Yeah, i have yet to see any actually good arguments for all this unification and merging talk. Do people just have some OCD stuff going or are there any real problems with the way it is right now?
I don’t want the same post to show up 5 times in a row. And even when it’s not in a row I’m tired of seeing the same post, but on 50 different places over the course of a week. That example happens all the damn time with political posts. I don’t want to filter them all out, but seeing the same thing over and over and over again is extremely annoying.
It’s interesting but wouldn’t the most active community out of the bunch take dominance of the feed?
For example you have community “xyz” who is on lemmy world and has 100 posts a day and then you have the other “xyz” community on lemmy ee who has 500 posts a day. The one on lemmy ee would take the feed and essentially become the most popular one, this would make the other community basically disappear as everyone would move to the more active one.
Edit: spelling corrections
I think it would be better to use a flexible tagging system so things can trend organically, like Mastodon.
We have the “scaled” sort that was made precisely to account for this. Try it on your subscribed feed
Scaled is better, but it’s by no means perfect. It also likes to show posts with 0-3 comments on them that are < 1 hour old. I’ve found that if I just open the tab and let it chill for 30 minutes then come back to it you can get some actually good content.
If they kept the original scaled as like scaled new, and make a scaled hot or something I’d be much more interested. I don’t want to be the first to comment most of the time.
This could be mitigated by sorting the posts by votes and activity relative to the community-size.
Kbin had this once. If I remember right, it was called Collections. The Mod of a collection could add communities to it and their content would show up in one list.
But then why have the collection if one mod decides who can go into it. What if, example, !tech@lemmy.org allows military tech posts, but the collection “tech” does not. What happens?
The collections don’t have rules as you can’t post directly to them. If the collection mod don’t want to have military tech in it, they would have to remove tech from the list of aggregated communities.
This still wouldnt solve crossposting
I have seen people post the same political posts on any meme community that doesnt have a rule against politics
We can give it a try.
PieFed kinda does this with Topics. There are the regular Lemmy communities, then they get grouped into topics and you can see all of the same communities in one topic at the same time without even having to subscribe to each one.
if you dont wanna crosspost then dont crosspost. if you dont like crossposts then dont sub to two overlapping communities. let me live in peace
The problem with this is who decides which communities can post into the feed. Who moderates it? What if the moderator of the feed and the moderator of the community have a disagreement on rules? If the communities can only follow the rules of the feed what’s the point of having the feed and not a community?
You could add a Topic Selection to community creation, but who removes communities that don’t fit into it? A voting system? Who gets to vote?
client side and aggregate all “pics@*” for instances your user can see
I disagree. Keep it the way it is without any automation like that
Agree, but I feel OP is trying to stop multiple communities showing the same exact post and maybe wanted to find a way to get rid of… duplicates
the way it is, it’s like whack-a-mole and if one of the mods on one of them bans people for a stupid reason, there’s all the others to go to
No, but I would like to see a feature where the same community across different instances are all grouped together. Analogous to hashtags in mastodon I guess.
Would be cool. Something like you can add Communities to other community’s so that people can create parent communities to combine multiple communities into one. Optionally of course.