Fediverse projects are maturing and adoption of them is trending up. I'm excited for the further development of the underlying technologies as well as the apps being built to leverage those technologies into even more integrated, user-friendly experiences.
With any developing tech, small annoyances are found and ultimately patched or worked around. It's to be expected that no user experience is ever perfect, even for matured ecosystems. Typically, some smaller annoyances are tolerated when balanced with the overall utility and usefulness of the tech.
One of the issues I've noticed (and I'm sure I'm not the first or only), is that when posts are relevant enough that the OP decides to cross-post into multiple communities, the comments and engagement stays with each community post leading to separate conversations.
The existance of separate conversations itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Maybe you post a recipe for Pot Roast in a general cooking community and also a community that helps refine recipes to improve them. It may be that the two separate conversations make more sense as the nature of discourse is focused on two different aspects of the content posted. If they were combined, it would be more difficult to sift through chatter to get at the discussion you were looking for.
This concept is true for different communities as well as different instances. Maybe the Pot Roast recipe conversation generated on carnivores(at)lemmy.instance is substantly different from the conversation at vegan-curious(at)lemmy.instance and the existance of both is bolstered by the cultures and seneabilities of the different instance/communities. That could create usefull and/or thoughtful discourse that maybe wouldn't have happened if everyone was mixed together and talking past each other.
However, there are plenty of informative posts attached to very similar communities on a given instance as well as posted to mirror-communities across separate instances. Each individual post is a separate entity and i find myself jumping in to different conversations of the same content to see what's being said in each. In addition to general replies often asking the same questions across all of the posts, unique engagement is diffuse and not connecting.
I imagine that an OP would have trouble keeping up with all of these different interactions and likely defaulting to paying their attention to only one or two while the remaining posts are left to fend for themselves. Even if the OP stayed on top of them all, I assume they'd often have to answer the same questions multiple times.
_The question I pose is: _
What is the solution to myriad and diffuse conversations around cross-posts? Is there a way to handle this situation thru lemmy-ettiquette or does it require a technological solution?
Maybe we handle it thru culture and expectation. If the decided upon method was to post once and then link that post to other communities for exposure, maybe that funnels everyone into one post to interact (when that's what OP wants).
Is there a software solution on the app developer level that combines like posts together? Is it a protocol level solution thats required? Maybe something that allows a single post to essentially 'tag' different communities for exposure, while only posting once? Can we associate posts to an individual user rather than associating the post to a community, so all replies come to the user post rather than in a community?
I don't know what the solution looks like and I'm not savvy enough to understand the protocol/software side to know if any of my examples are realistic. I also don't know if this is an issue for anyone else, or at least one that lemmy-ites actuallly care about enough to try and solve.
Does anyone know if work is being done to address this? Am I focusing on something that is simply not a priority? I welcome your thoughts.
...I tried to choose what I thought was the best place for this post, but I'm open to moving it if I was in error. (Ironically, something that might be easier if posts were handled differently). :)
_edited to make the community examples formatted as from the same instance instead of two separate instances _
