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.
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
As a user, I very much do not want a common discussion space.
I am with you as a user, but also an instance administrator. Forcing our hosted communities together with federated communities would take away nearly all motivation I have to host an instance in the first place.
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.
Allowing Lemmygrad to have it’s own “books” community looks like a feature to me, not a problem. The terminally online tend to overpower any other conversation. IMO, we should work to preserve a diversity of perspectives. If all discussions are forced to be centralized we’ve just recreated Reddit with extra steps.
I agree. If there are multiple communities with the same subject, I want to pick which one(s) I participate in based on the people and culture there.
I specifically do not want the toxic, Reddit-like experience that the big instances often have.
Off topic, but the new list of crossposts looks really good!
Back on topic, I think the way PieFed does it looks really good.
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.
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.
No. Your comment would only go to that specific post you replied under.
Maybe if mods from both communities agree to share comments. Some communities want to remain separate.
Its not really combining post comments. It would just be displaying cross post comments in different sections at the bottom.
I stick to my idea.
Each community should be able to decide for themselves.
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).
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.
Allowing /c/anti_thing to direct all of their users to posts in /c/thing is a bad idea.
Personally I have never viewed the “separation problem” as a problem, but the single largest benefit of federation/decentralization.
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.
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.
