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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think it would be a good idea, especially if it’s configurable. Currently, threads on most posts tend to be fairly small, and combining them could help lead to more lively discussions.

Off topic, but the new list of crossposts looks really good!

Back on topic, I think the way PieFed does it looks really good.

EDIT: After reading through the Git issue and the other comments in this thread, it is not very clear to me what “combining comments from cross-posts on the post screen” means. I understood it at first to mean that you will pool all comments together and show all of them in all cross-posts, but now I am not so sure. Still, in general terms, I think that mechanisms to share activity with niche communities are good

I would say yes, there are cases in which I have thought that this would be a nice thing to have. Especially when cross-posting to a smaller niche community.

I can think of a few potential small issues. For example, cross-posters can edit the body of the message, so you might in some cases end up with comments that seem out of place as they refer to the content specific to a cross-post. You also have the rare case in which the same post might mean different things in different communities.

But, overall, I see it as beneficial. Quirks can be fine-tuned later on.

Here is a reference to what that looks like.

I’m not sure how much I like the presentation here. Another option would be to have tabs between the sorting options and the comments.

If you want to combat people only contributing to the most active thread, maybe sort each instance’s comments by total comments ascending?

If you wanted to leave a top-level comment in the other thread from the view you were in, you could do like a Window Shade type UI where each comment section is contained in a box with a clickable header. Clicking the header collapses the shade, leaving only the header. Kind of like collapsing a comment. The other thread comments could be under the primary thread comments and collapsed (or auto-expanded; maybe that’s a UI setting). Like this:

Yes by default, though it should be possible to post without joining the wider discussion, imagine (whatever you think about them) “shit X says” metacommunities’ discussion getting mixed in with the sincere commenters

So if I post something in the comment of a thread that is cross posted to another Community my comments will appear in that Community as well? That sounds awful. I don’t know why anyone would want that.