I just crossposted something using Thunder and another user let me know that my crosspost did not show that the other post was the original.

See here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/11901004

Not sure how that can happen but seems like a bug in Thunder then?

  • darklightxi@lemmy.worldM
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    2 months ago

    Just wanted to chime in here! I think the implementation of cross-posts is up for interpretation (and can definitely be changed if one is preferred over the other). Generally speaking, there are two types of implementations:

    Cross-posts only copy over the title and link of the original post

    • This is what Thunder currently does, unless it’s a text-only post (in which case, it copies over the text content of the original post since that’s the only relevant part of the post)
    • The idea here is that we typically want to change the contents of the cross-post to be relevant to the community that we post to.

    Cross-posts copy all content of the original post (title, link, body)

    • This is what Lemmy UI does, but it injects “crossposted from” into the body of the post
    • This can be useful if you want to post the same post across multiple-communities with the same body

    From this discussion, I do think that it could be valuable to add an easier way to inject the original body of a post into a cross-post. If you would like this to be a feature, please create a new feature request on GitHub!


    A side note on cross-posts:

    I believe that Lemmy considers any posts with the same link as a cross-post. There’s no distinction (from the API) on which post was the “original” post, or whether a post was crossposted “from a community” vs “to a community”. This is also the reason why there is additional metadata for each “cross-post” in Thunder. The additional metadata allows you to figure out when a given post was created to find the “original” post.

    If you’re curious about specific implementation detail, @micahmo@programming.dev might be able to answer them!

    • micahmo@programming.devM
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      17 days ago

      I think you hit the nail on the head. I’ll just add for clarity that (unless something has changed) Lemmy can only determine cross-posts based on matching links (whether it’s an article, image, etc.). There is no way to correlate text cross-posts, which is why the UI (both the Lemmy web UI and Thunder) put the little “cross-posted from…” note in the body. At the very least, that helps the user find the original post from a cross-post, considering there is no special relationship in the back-end between cross-posted text posts.

      Again, this was my understanding of how things worked last time I looked into this.