cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/538685
No more duplicate posts
One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from linux@lemmy.world, linux@programming.dev, linux@lemmy.ml, etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it's a bit less obvious because there's a wider range of subjects involved.
Except now, it doesn't, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.
We're still figuring out whether it's a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It's a tricky UX and social question.
I've held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it'll be added soon.
I checked: definitely the first one. Also another check: blocking does work to not show the comments, I checked both blocking all users on a particular instance and blocking a specific community, and in both situations those comments did not appear, though all the other comments did.
I can see how for some people it could be a good idea to switch to the second though, e.g. in the form of allowing a toggle, and yet allowing all also does facilitate community discovery, at the expense of exposure to less well moderated areas of the Threadiverse. Although I'm personally really enjoying seeing comments from communities that I choose to not appear in my Subscribed feed on the main page, so I would hate for your second way to become the default with no option to change it.
Overall I feel like the addition of this feature, while not perfect (your point about it being opt-out) is more of a "10 steps forward, half a step back" kind of thing, i.e. the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages, even though the true ideal would be to put the choice into the hands of the end-user, as PieFed does so exceedingly much of in so many ways, yet this feature is so very brand-new so not this one currently.
Edit: ultimately, the way it is now, the choice of which ones to show is primarily in the hands of the OP, who chose what communities to post the link to. Plus also if anyone else cross-posted it. A PieFed user can override that decision, but only by either blocking or ignoring (scrolling past) the comments that they do not want to see. This makes sense to me.