this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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[RFC] Thoughts on Combining Comments for Crossposts? (dubvee.org)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by ptz@dubvee.org to c/lemmyapps@lemmy.world
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Disclaimer: If this isn't in the spirit of the community, feel free to remove the post and I'll re-post it in my app-specific community. I'm posting it here since it's a feature that I'm thinking through that may eventually make it into the Lemmy app I develop, and the people here would probably have good ideas/opinions on the matter. Plus, other apps may have already implemented this, and someone may helpfully point that out.

With that out of the way, I'm looking to get some feedback on whether this is a good idea or something that only sounds like a good idea.

Basically, when a post has crossposts, my idea is to fetch the comments for the other cross posts and merge them all into one big comment tree. Regardless of which cross-post you land on, you'll see the same comments.

  • If you reply to the post (top-level comment), it'll post to whichever cross post you're currently on.
  • If you reply to an existing comment, it'll go to whatever post that comment was posted to.

The goal is to bring some unity to disparate communities that have a lot of crossover content.

Is this a good idea? Dumb idea? Can anyone think of any gotchas that might crop up? If I do implement this, it will be something the user can turn on/off.

Potential issues:

  • Culture clash between different communities
  • Mods of one community would not be able to mod every item shown
  • ???

Thoughts?

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[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Related: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2012

I think the devs want comments to be specific to the community in order to retain the culture of each community.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4225#issuecomment-1904443026

Combining comments is out, because these are different posts that live on different communities, each with their own members and mod policies.

Lemmy-ui already has a "post-deduplicator" that simplifies viewing cross-posts on the same page, that should probably be replicated in a lot of UIs. But that seems to me the best way to handle it.

This comment is another way to explain the issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4225#issuecomment-1837522660

This would be a bad user experience for certain communities. Imagine the same news article is posted in /c/cars and /c/fuckcars. It is not desired nor expected to have all comments combined.

But I do think there may be some room for combined comments, like when Lemmy has a method to group communities, maybe those comments could be combined from the grouped communities.

[–] Beaver@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 months ago

Reddit does have a solution to this by showing the other related posts

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

A generalization, but it sounds like you're trying to fix Federation, by making things defederated, to make things more centralized.

Federation has good points, and bad points. I don't mean to discourage you from your conversation, but I think you need to consider the meta of what Federation is.

Having said all that, I recently participated in a conversation about EA putting ads in their games, and there was three different posts in three different communities, on the same subject.

I literally had to add links in my comment, that I was duplicating, to the other two duplicated comments of mine, so they were all cross referenced. It was definitely a pain in the butt to do so.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Having said all that, I recently participated in a conversation about EA putting ads in their games, and there was three different posts in three different communities, on the same subject.

I literally had to add links in my comment, that I was duplicating, to the other two duplicated comments of mine, so they were all cross referenced. It was definitely a pain in the butt to do so.

That's basically the hassle I'm trying to address (won't go so far as to call it a problem, just an annoyance). I wouldn't say I'm attempting to centralize things, just bring multiple conversations together into one view.

When I think of centralization, I think of something that makes the aggregation point a load-bearing facet. In this case, it'd just be detecting that there's 3 posts for the same item (from the cross_posts list from the API) and pulling the comment trees from all 3 into one UI display. Each still exists as its own, and nothing relies on the UI doing the merging.

That said, it wouldn't do much in your scenario unless other UIs did something similar (i.e. you'd still need to cross-reference you comments to accommodate other UIs that view them separately). It would just make it easier on you to participate in conversation on 3 posts simultaneously. I guess it would be a bit easier to cross-reference your comments since you could do it from the same page, though.

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That said, it wouldn’t do much in your scenario unless other UIs did something similar (i.e. you’d still need to cross-reference you comments to accommodate other UIs that view them separately). It would just make it easier on you to participate in conversation on 3 posts simultaneously. I guess it would be a bit easier to cross-reference your comments since you could do it from the same page, though.

You're right, and something else to consider, I use the Lemmy web client, not a mobile app client.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 2 points 6 months ago

The app I develop is a web app that also works as a mobile PWA. I try to keep the number of "apps" to a minimum on my devices lol. Half of the icons in my app tray are PWAs I run myself :)