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?

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    2 months ago

    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)

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      2 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 :)