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

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.

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 pancake@a.com 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 games@lemmy.world would also show up on games@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.com disagree with pancakes@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.

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.

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 think this would be visually overwhelming

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.

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.

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.

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.

Would defederated users be able to see and participate?

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

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.

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

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.