Rather than try to act like a link aggregator where people submit links to articles and images and that submission comes with a comment thread specific to the fediverse instance in which it was submitted, what if each news site, image host, blog, whatever was itself the instance and the reddit-style instances federate with those. Someone submits an article to /m/news and the comments link goes to the instance associated with that article. Submission is the act of ‘bridging’ the article’s instance to yours. Everyone sees the same comment thread and it’s tied to the article itself. Comment on the article via kbin and everyone sees your comment. Perhaps the user can also see what other communities/instances where the article has been posted, and perhaps comments could be filtered by user instance.
Could also have instances have separate comment sections that don’t go the main one for communities that prefer to have insulated discussion (the discord effect, where you can share a link with friends and be assured that everyone can chat about it in an isolated environment), like “forking” the article.
I can see several benefits (and a few potential issues) with this, but it seemed like an interesting idea at least.
Obviously the biggest issue with this is getting the content sources on-board with acting like a federated server. But then again, tons of major sites use various third-party tech for comments on articles…
This already works on /kbin, at least with WriteFreely.
Any blogpost from WriteFreely blog (if followed by someone on /kbin) is fetched and displayed as another thread. You can comment, up- and downwote, and also boost it. WriteFreely account does not see interactions, but they federate across instances, including Mastodon.
An example WriteFreely blogpost, and the same blogpost, but viewed on /kbinWordpress can also be compatible with the Fediverse, but all implementations so far (which I have seen) treat posts as “notes” = toots = microblog posts - to cope with Mastodon dominance.
This effect could be achieved if cross-posted links simply all fed back into the comment section of the first community it was posted to.
To maybe better explain that, let’s say I cross-posted a link to [email protected], and [email protected], [email protected]. Under such a system, all 3 of these posts (despite being to separate communities) would share a single comment section (in this case, the one from [email protected], since it was the “first” one I chose to post to)… so if someone opened the thread on [email protected], they’d see the same comments as someone on either other community.
This implementation wouldn’t require getting content sources on board, and would cooperate with instances that weren’t federated (by simply creating a separate comment section for any instance that isn’t federated with the “first” one the link was posted to).
This doesn’t help if two users post the same link to two separate communities, but it’s at least a little bit cleaner without requiring any external buy-in.
I agree that is a logical initial step, but I wonder about ‘cross-posting’ actually catching on. Reddit often saw duplicated submissions across subreddits, but was able to collate them by the “other discussions” approach simply through url-matching. Relying on cross-posting also requires users to be members of disparate communities.
The real problem (IMO) with it being automatic based on the URL is that it’d be impossible to isolate communities with radically different views or posting guidelines - for example, a conservative community and a liberal community sharing a comment section about a political article would be awful… neither group wants that, and it creates moderation problems - who would ultimately be responsible for moderation on the article’s comments? The content source itself? (That seems incredibly unlikely to end well.)
I think it’s an interesting idea, but there’s some major implementation hurdles and I’m not sure what an ideal solution would be…
Maybe the act of defederation acts like a filter to a comment thread, or at least a “click-to-view”? Comments are there unless defederated or more simply blocked by the user. Much like users can block specific magazines, users, or instances, the same filters would apply to the comments.
Voting could also have multiple purposes: one to raise/lower comments/threads across platforms and perhaps a second to allow a user to sort by “votes from [instance]”. If you want to see what your preferred instance voted for toggle that (i.e. factor only votes from that instance) to get a new sort.
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