Piefed groups comment boxes from crossposts into one post. So no matter which crosspost you're looking at, you'll see all responses.
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Its very nice and allows you to post on the original post, the cross posted post, and all other places. Its truely federated.
Hmm... that's nice, but the comments are still separated.
It would be better if the separate reply chains were integrated but I know there are potential issues that need to be thought through.
They are separated because communities have different rules and different moderation teams.
I know as a user that the same comment on instance A and instance B would be perceived differently. I also know that if I report a comment, it will be reviewed by different mod teams.
As a mod, having a clear view of what comments have been made in my community and which ones have not also helps.
This kinda erodes cultural differences between different communities though. Different communities may have very different approaches on how to talk about a post. I feel like this approach just leads to monoculturism.
I think you may be overestating the amount of crossposts that happen for the idea that it would somehow cause 'monoculturalism'
Do not eagerly misread what could be an evidence of the converse - that we already have low policulturalism because of difficulties in implementation and this feature is just going to nail the nail in the coffin.
I am confused as to what you are getting at here. Piefed crossposts display post content from different communities separately within a link post that is crossposted.
Yes. It is being worked on, and you are not far off.
Respondents here have mentioned that Piefed and Lemmy list cross-posts in places, sometimes in the community listing, sometimes in the post itself.
That's missing the point, which is that the conversations should be combined.
Take it a step further, though. You shouldn't have to combine posts, they should all be the same post.
So how do we get there? Both Piefed and Lemmy do this internally, and don't expose this to other instances. NodeBB (aka me) is hoping to explore this question and put in the protocol research to make this a reality. I'll be working together with members of the Forum and Threaded Discussions Working Group about these things. (forum-wg@community.nodebb.org)
The issue (as usual) is buy-in from Lemmy and Piefed (and don't forget mbin!) We all have to move in lockstep so that nobody gets left behind.
We've only just started discussions on how this might work, but hopefully we'll be able to make this a reality soon.
I don't want it to be combined. Different communities have VERY different conversations on the same content.
the conversations should be combined
Disagree. As OP points out, there is value in separating the discussions as well.
There is, but I am not sold on giving up entirely on the idea simply because disparate communities might not want to talk to another.
I agree that treading lightly is paramount, but the benefits of cross-community interaction could very much be worth it!
One thing is for sure: making this an opt-out is not the way forward.
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Different conversations in different moods and cultures on the same subject are something completely human and normal, and tech should not work to undo this. When we have seen tech undo this is with social media silos, after all.
Which is to say, any "solution" that integrates those conversations into one view should be, where possible, client-side only. That way I can opt in to view some conversations as unified or not, depending on eg.: how well do I know the context, or whether the OP is a person known for cross-posting (and to where), while at the same time not forcing everyone else to have their culture of conversation subsumed into essentially an attempt to make topical subreddits.
This is also how I feel.
Getting different perspectives from different circles instead of being migrated to one dominant website culture is a big part of why I haven’t moved to piefed, since it seems like that semi-forced centralization is part of their vision.
Agree. Piefed doesn't give me much confidence with their “centrist-esque” more-centralized-than-not, and actually has lost some in my eyes since the creator has specifically pushed code for antagonizing one specific member of the community for the sin of [checks papers] behaving in a quirkier way than the average.
I don't get how you think its centralised here. What code are you referring to?
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Getting different perspectives from different circles instead of being migrated to one dominant website culture is a big part of why I haven’t moved to piefed, since it seems like that semi-forced centralization is part of their vision.
Have you used Piefed and its multi-community comment system? I am asking because from using it, I don't the impression of "being migrated to one dominant website culture".
Finally someone who gets it. This "problem" is in fact a total non-issue. Different groups talk about the same thing all the time. This is good, not bad.
Is there a software solution on the app developer level that combines like posts together?
As mentioned in this thread already, piefed consolidates all the comments for crossposts when it detects them. As an example, you can look at this post on piefed.social. The link I shared is for the post on !news@lemmy.world, but below it you can see comments from the same article posted in !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk as well as !world@lemmy.world in their own sections as you keep scrolling. So, problem solved, right? Well...
One of the key phrases I used above is "when it detects them". So, how does piefed detect crossposts? The answer is pretty simple, it basically just looks for other posts that point to the same destination url. In the example I linked, that would be the Guardian article that is being discussed. This is the same way that lemmy detects crossposts. This approach is nice and easy and computationally cheap on the database (quick), however, there is a big shortfall of this method...posts that don't point to a url (discussion posts) can never be detected as crossposts. Lemmy offers the ability to hit the crosspost button on a discussion post and it will create a big block quote of the original post for you, but it isn't actually recognized as a crosspost in the software.
I don't have a good technical solution to be able to make discussion posts (and other non-url posts, like piefed events or polls) be crossposted properly. It likely would need to be tracked in the database somehow, but it would rely on users somehow indicating that the post they are making is meant to be a crosspost. I don't know really...
Anyway, that is the current state of crossposts. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
This one of the great features of Piefed!
I think there is potentially a lot of value in having separate crossposts per community... E.g. if a link touches on multiple separate topics (say, cinematography and nature), then people visiting an cinematography community would probably prefer to see conversation related to their interest..
Agree that crossposts from similar communities (same name) across different servers should be merged though (although there probably should be a way for community mods to opt out of that...)
The different communities on Piefed are still separated within the post. You can still see which community you would be replying to
I'm thinking more about less clutter while reading
It's not that cluttered. Have you looked at how it looks on piefed?
Yea, I'm not into it..
Perhaps if it explicitly showed my subscribed communities first, and had a clear separator for non-subscribed communities. But I would prefer an option to not see stuff from other communities at all
That might be possible. Rimu could add filters into community settings to hide crossposts.
Every instance should simply just stop thinking they should have their own version of X community.
Doesn’t PieFed merge communities with the same name?
Consolidation is one of the things the fediverse tries to mitigate. I see your point, but federated services need some amount of redundancy and autonomy for the whole thing to work.
@meldrik @BorisBoreUs Piefed can do that now?
I think it shows other comments, if the posts is crossposted.
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everyone said PieFed, but Lemmy v1.0 will be improving this a bit too
You can see it lists the crossposts showing how many comments and upvotes each has
The Boost app does a pretty decent job of this too already
From what I recall, I believe that Reddit handles crossposts in a similar manner, that is, comments in one crosspost in one subreddit don't show in other crossposted subreddits.
Like Blaze mentioned in another comment, one of the problems with putting all the comments together is that different communities have different rules, so a comment that would be fine in one community might get you in trouble in a different community. People already get confused by this as it is. If all the comments from different crossposts get aggregated in one place, I think it would cause complete confusion and more work for mods.
Piefed splits up the comment boxes based on community when a thread is crossposted, so you can still distinguish between the comment boxes on different communities despite them being visible.
That said, a potential future option here would be a community opt-out of crosspost functionality in this way
Good to know, thanks! Also, good idea on the opt-out.
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If the OP had a mechanism to opt-in to aggregated comments, rather than individual community comments, there could be an identifying notice that the comments of that post were being "hosted" in whichever community on whichever instance and were governed by their rules. Essentially, commenters would be guests in that forum and be expected to comport themselves accordingly. I don't think it needs to be complicated for mod teams.
What if upon cross-posting the default is separation, but a request is sent to the original community to request a comment tree merge?
Then you don't have to share comment space with the tankies unless you wish it
Alternative suggestion - allow communities to block crossposting functionality with specified communities in the community settings.
As mentioned in another comment, as a mod there's not a lot of value mixing other comments I cannot mod about to the ones I can mod. Seems like an easy way to abuse the system and avoid moderation
The solution has been, for decades, to dump the WWW and continue the Memex-Dynabook-Xanadu line of development where everything related is webbed together by default.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
(long story)
What if a post was its own separate thing, detached from the communities. You then "attach" the post to one or more communities.
When a user comments on a post, the comment "comes from community xyz" but all comments are attached to the post not the community.
Lemmy applications can choose to filter comments from one or more communities or show them all.
This would mean a fundamental change to how both Lemmy and Piefed work.
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