this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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tl;dr: I fully agree with you that there's room for improvement here, but I can't for the life of me decide on a solution I actually like lmao.
Yeah, it's definitely going to be common while the masses settle on which community/instance they want to emphasize.
The question for now is, how do you think this should actually be handled? What counts as identical links? There's several factors that can change, and that makes handling the problem much more complicated than it initially seems.
In your example, it's 1) the same user posting 2) the same link with 3) the same title to 4) different communities. That does seem like basic reposting, and it would initially seem like we should just combine them and have it say "[USER], 10 hours ago posted to [Community1], [C2], [C3], etc"
But each of those communities and each of those instances may abide by different rules. It would definitely be a disservice to each community to pile all the discussion threads into one communal comment section.
So.... I guess if it's 4) a different community, then it's okay to have 'duplicate' threads? Uh oh.
I have a feeling that same argument would apply to veryyy similar threads with 1) different users, 2) different links to the same content, or 3) different titles. So what the heck, how do we improve this situation?? What are we even asking for??
@shepherd Yeah I'm not sure of an appropriate solution either.
These may not even need to be merged, but maybe there is a way to just display one thread and link all identical links as a "cross-post" within the thread? That way we're just seeing a single aggregated link without a bunch of spam? Something like this:
That's not bad, but that's only the solution for Identical 1) User 2) Link 3) Title, but Different 4) Community. I'm not opposed to implementing it, or something like it! It's definitely a step in the right direction, but it's not complete.
What if it's Identical 2) Link, but Different 1) User 3) Title 4) Community?? Basically, a bunch of different people post the same link to different communities, and they alll write a different title lmao. Basically the exactly same "spam" problem, harder to stack.
I don't really think we should do a whole grid of the different people posting different titles to different communities lmao.
(Don't even get me started on 2) Different Links to the same content hahah)
A big issue with trying to merge is that some groups will have a completely different direction of discussion from the same topic. Especially with a political link to a news paper. You can't reasonably merge those conversations together.
I think the intention is to keep the disparate conversations in a single container that you can swap between, rather than merging those conversations together.
I can see that as an issue as well. Griefers could easily harass other groups by creating clone instances and then filling it with shit.
That is where the beauty of federation shines through. You just defederate that instance - or as a user just block the whole instance.