Combine duplicate posts from different instances?
Combine duplicate posts from different instances?
Scenario: me killing time by doom scrolling lemmy. I see a post linking to a news article. The next 4 posts are the exact same post in the same community by the same user but on a different instance.
I understand the general mechanics behind lemmy so I know this is standard behavior. However, this can become quite tedious and annoying.
My suggestion: when the device pulls new posts if the same title, content, and user are detected, it combines them into one post. For comments, it creates a "root/parent comment" for each instance.
Up and down votes could be an issue though. My resolution to this would be when you press up/down vote a drop-down menu appears with "All" followed by all the different instances. I can think of lots of different mechanics for multi selections.
For the main feed, where the instance is normally stated, it states only the community followed by "multiple" or similar. When tapped, instead of taking you to that community on that instance, it has the equivalent of a help bubble pop up listing the instances so you could visit each one.
It would also be nice if something like this was possible for duplicate posts on the same instance across multiple communities.
I don't think this is a thing and I'm not sure it reasonably can be.
- Maybe if someone properly crossposted, Lemmy could know which posts are identical and skip dupes. Though it would still be a crapshoot which community got displayed... you might end up seeing the comments from the original post in some tiny/dead community while a crosspost to a huge community blows up with it's own comments.
- But for non-crossposted duplicate posts... there's no relationship between them as far as lemmy is concerned. They're separate posts to separate communities that just happen to look very similar. Deducing such a scenario is very sticky.
I figured it wouldn't be easy in core lemmy, but since apps like liftoff are already parsing that data, it might be easier. It's just one of the bigger annoyances of lemmy.
I'm not sure what data you think liftoff is parsing that lemmy itself is not or could not, but none of the issues in play seem to me to be meaningfully different in an app vs in the core software
I wouldn't bet on a short-term solution though.
Same issue with blocking, I've blocked nfl communities from 3 instances today
I remember following this issue in the Lemmy github page. Tl;dr version:
- Too complicated and too late in the game to implement it
- It's easier to do it in the client but there is nowhere to store the configuration online