I was chatting with a friend, and she mentioned how she tries to at least set up a README, which includes her vision for the project and her plan for the implementation, design, and goals.

Best case scenario is that the planning helps her complete the project herself. Worst case scenario, someone else can pick up where she left off and use her considerations for the project.

I’m thinking of doing that for future projects too

I think the issue here is

they don’t show up under “posts” on your own profile

It makes sense to hide read posts on the main feed, but not when you’re looking at a particular user?

Yep I think the defederation point is the big one which causes the idea to break down. I’ll edit the post to better reflect my thoughts now

Thank you!

Hope it helps :)

Look, honestly: if you want Facebook ot Twitter, go back to them.

This post was to talk about the merits/drawbacks of a potential change, and the constructive comments on the post have been helpful for that. Some of the other ‘solutions’ that have been posted here feel even more antithetical to the idea of decentralization (ex. redirecting upvotes, having communities follow other communities) so I was looking for a compromise that would address some of the annoyances without making the site another centralized platform. The intent was to allow users to choose how they want to link cross posts together, rather than having the community (or an app/frontend) make the decision for them. We’ve also been seeing users naturally gravitate to a few instances/communities, so I was looking for ways to redirect some of that traffic back to lesser known spaces.

Regardless, I appreciate the comment. Reading the perspectives on this post helped me see how locking the post completely would cause more issues and annoyances than it would help with. A simple “we are discussing X over on this post, feel free to join” seems like the better compromise.

that’s fair :)

Everyone who’s subscribed to the same communities will see all of each others’ comments.

This still relies on everyone using the same app/front-end.

I guess I’m thinking about how it would be helpful in more general cases. If someone has an issue with a FOSS app, and they ask about it in two small communities, it would be much better to have the troubleshooting discussion in one place rather than have both communities missing part of the context.

Ultimately in your example, the user can still make both posts, this doesn’t change that. It just directs the comments to one post’s comment section rather than having it spread out.

Still it’s good to think about cases where OP tries to abuse the system. Would a good middle ground just be the first implementation then? For OP to link to the post that they want to be the main discussion thread, but people are free to ignore that if they want.

I agree, instance assistant (our extension actually!) handles this, but it would be much better to have it exist natively.

this proposal would give more controls to the bigger communities

what are the concerns that come to mind?

I’d rather just have different communities

All the individual communities would continue to exist as they do right now. When it makes sense for a post to have a deeper discussion, users can lock and redirect accordingly

This works for viewing all the comments so far, but it doesn’t solve the discussion aspect since commentors from each community won’t be seeing or responding to the other comments. This is a bigger issue with smaller communities, where they’d mostly be top level comments / chains with minimal depth from each smaller community. Yes you can see all the comments, but the discussion quality is poor.

It’s also not as helpful when the automation fails. Something I’ve found is that the ‘crosspost’ field starts to get crowded on posts that link to a popular website. Combining comment sections from ALL of those posts isn’t as useful as having some intentional action from the OP.

A key aspect about this proposal is that it requires the OP to do something. If it doesn’t make sense for a community (ex. different intents behind the Politics communities), then OP shouldn’t lock their post. If OP does it anyway, then you can downvote that post.

For smaller extensions, you can start by looking at the manifest.json as this file is the entry point. You can see which part of the code needs access to ‘everything’ and go from there.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json

For example, with Instance Assistant for Lemmy, you need to give access to all sites because it needs to run on any Lemmy site and that’s not something you can hardcode in.

You could try from this

https://lemmy.world/post/1289432

Ideally try for a smaller size, else it takes time to load and wastes people’s data

We actually have an extension for this, it’s one of the more popular extensions for Lemmy&Kbin, going by the counts on chrome/firefox stores:

!instance_assistant@lemmy.ca

It was originally made to solve this problem, but we’ve been adding other features as well. Right now you can redirect communities and posts, and redirect links by right clicking on them.

Let me know if it works, and also where it doesn’t so that we can improve it :)

I personally find a lack of downvotes to be annoying and harmful. People don’t go through the trouble of reporting problem content, and it usually leads to poor quality inflammatory content rising to the top.

If you’re new and haven’t really set up yet, explore other instances. You can find one that aligns with what you want out of Lemmy without jumping through hoops.

If you have set up, there are account migration tools for you. They just aren’t perfect yet

Sorry to those that have already seen this. I’m trying to space out the posts so it’s not in a large clump in your feeds. People have different subscription lists, so I’m trying to reach those that haven’t seen it yet.

These are the last 4 posts :)

A few days late, but this is actually something I’ve been working on for Instance Assistant! I implemented a first attempt and released it this weekend. Let me know if it works for you :)

It should pop up in the sidebar of any post on a foreign instance. If it doesn’t load, you may need to refresh the page. That’s something I’m still working on because redirecting on a Lemmy site isn’t always detected as navigating to a new page.

From what I’ve experienced with my extension, every update has to go through a review process. Firefox is pretty fast, chrome takes a few days and edge takes a while (opera hasn’t finished reviewing my first version, so I stopped trying with them).

The only time I failed a review was early on when my build script choked and I submitted an empty file to Chrome (whoops). So I can’t really tell how good those reviews are, but I’m not planning on testing them. I just know that they exist

I’ll see if I can roll this into a future update for !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca . I wanted to try and get a “post to Lemmy” button working, and this is a part of that. Looks like the reddit one was done using a Reddit API, and while the Lemmy ones are different it shouldn’t be too bad.

UPDATE: I’m able to search for links within the body of posts, but haven’t figured out why it doesn’t search the links yet. I’ll look into it later

The only limitation might be that the search is limited to a particular instance. Since there is an unlimited number of instances, I don’t think there’s an easy way to search them all without some external service doing some caching of some kind. We could have it search a bunch of different instances, but I want to minimize unnecessary / spammy requests.

@Bucky@816am.ddns.net, is it important for the extension icon to display the number, or did you usually run a manual search?****

Relevant bit from the post, we will now also be prepping for the Firefox Mobile app, now that they are opening mobile up to all extensions!

This may need some reworking to make it easier to use on mobile. If you have any thoughts, or would like to participate in the preview/dev releases, let me know here or elsewhere :)

Hope it helps :)