(Major event happens) "I should post immediately without first checking if there are already 30 other posts about this" - eviltoast

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  • Adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev
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    4 months ago

    Thing is, a cross post is nothing special. It’s a) a post with an identical link, and b) a post with “cross posted from…” appended to the body content.

    It is still just a post. Lemmy (and k/mbin) just attempt to mask the fact there are multiple of them.

    I don’t know if it can be done any better though, ActivityPub has quite a few quirks.

    • OpenStars@discuss.online
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      4 months ago

      So if the title were changed from the original, it would still recognize it as a cross post, somehow? Perhaps based on it sharing an identical URL, or something added when you go into the cross-posting interface - if so then I suppose as you said the text in the body about the fact that it’s cross-posted. Hrm, and phrased differently, if someone were to share an identical URL independently, so not going through the cross-posting interface at all, would Lemmy and K/Mbin still recognize it as a cross-post?

      Thanks for that insight. So if OP meant from a traffic standpoint, then yeah I see it doesn’t help at all. It also still splits the comments across the entire Fediverse, rather than concentrating them into like a megathread. And people could upvote multiple posts, and comment inside multiple ones, etc., so it actually increases traffic to have them split up, perhaps not quite as much as fully independent posts but more than if they were singular ones.

      Whereas from a UX standpoint, it is so helpful to tidy things up to see e.g. one post shared to 5-20 communities rather than each of those showing up as its own individual post, taking up most of your feed even after you’ve already consumed the content and want to see what else is going on. And as we are seeing, each community has its own slant on the type of discussions that they want to have, so even if the posts could be conjoined somehow, into like a pseudo-megathread, the impact of that would hit very differently than allowing them to be different (cross-)posts. So cross-posting seems a nice balance between fully individual vs. fully conjoined:-).