Question: Should Crossposting be handled differently?

[SleeplessOne1917]

Question

Currently, crossposting works in a way that I find unintuitive.

If you make a post in a community that has the same URL as a post in another community, it will be marked as a crosspost regardless of whether the user clicked the crosspost button. This can be seen here.

Likewise, if you crosspost a post that doesn't have a URL, it will not be marked as a crosspost. Compare this lemmygrad post that I crossposted from lemmy.ml.

Is this an intentional decision on the maintainers' part, or is this a bug? If it is a deliberate decision, should it be changed anyway?

[dessalines]

The post URL is the "link" that connects cross-posts, not the lemmy ids. There's probably different ways to link posts besides their URL, but I'm not sure what that'd be.

The bonus of that is that news articles, images, everything can be properly connected, regardless of place or time.

The negative is that text-posts without URLs don't appear as cross-posts.

[maegul]

From a user's perspective:

• The automatic cross-post connection based on URL is a cool and nice feature (I would have requested it if I hadn't worked out that it happens automatically)
• The lack of a connection for a manual cross-post is both unintuitive and probably rather desirable.
  • For example, I've seen suggestions/requests on a few occasions to the effect of people wanting to view the aggregate of all comments to all cross-posts of the same or original post. However feasible such a feature would be (I imagine it'd entirely for the UI/front end to manage, and feasibly so), it speaks to the users' desire to be able to engage with the multiple cross-posts and their various comments, mostly I imagine to consume as varied/interesting/diverse a feed as possible.
  • Beyond that, and thinking about lemmy as more than a link-aggregator, but, naturally capable of supporting more generic social media activity such as a blogosphere type ecosystem or even something encroaching on that of other fediverse platforms somewhat, surfacing the connections to manual cross-posts probably provides a good deal of value there too.

[Nutomic]

Crossposts dont really exist in the Lemmy backend. All it does is, when retrieving a post with GET /api/v3/post, perform a search for posts with the same url and include them in the result. So its not related to the crosspost button in the ui at all, and there is no way to represent text-only crossposts. For enhancements in this area open a new issue or check existing ones.