I might be able to set something up with the InstanceAssistant browser extension. It would be nice to have it in the main UI, but this could help temporarily.

I’ll send a PM :)

This is amazing, thank you for reaching out to the dev!

This was on the list of ideas for InstanceAssistant, but I didn’t know where to start. It is great news that it was added to the original extension.

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.

Hope it helps!

Good to know, could you share what website you were trying to post from?

I think one thing I should implement is a little toast message that explains what went wrong (ex. No title contents found)

Hope it helps :)

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 :)

Thank you, hope it helps!

There ARE other downsides to this law, outside of the hissy fit Facebook is throwing.

For example, smaller independent news companies don’t have the bargaining power to come to a fair agreement with Facebook, like the larger organizations can. A solution to that might be to have some standard rates set up, but again, don’t know enough about it

I don’t agree with the solution the government came up with, but the problem still exists and I don’t understand it well enough to come up with an alternative solution.

Making news is expensive, and good quality news (not mucked up by corporate interests) needs a way to fund that work. We don’t want news to be an outlet for corporations investing in a mouthpiece. So traditionally this was done through advertising.

Now people barely ever click through to the websites so the advertising doesn’t work. Meanwhile the places where people ARE seeing the news do have ads. The content is produced by one party, and the profit goes to another.

The problem exists and needs a solution, but I don’t know what it might be. Australia brought in a similar law successfully and Facebook/Google came to a deal. Canada might also be able to do that?

The other long term solution IMO is to make the platforms obsolete with things like Mastodon and Lemmy. That might take some time though

Not really emergency notifications but news, which tbh isn’t as important in this case because non-Canadian news orgs aren’t affected and are covering it too. So there isn’t an immediate risk I don’t think.

As for the main point: The problem is that a subset of the population ONLY gets information through one platform. The only way to reach them is through that platform, and not reaching them means excess costs when you have to rescue/treat/otherwise deal with the fallout. It’s also the government’s job to inform people and keep them safe.

At the same time, the companies need to be regulated by the government. Can’t just let them have free reign because they seized control

Yea someone actually just commented on the API and I should be able to find posts by link/title on other instances. Previously I was trying with the simple URL manipulation, but this would be a reasonable workaround. I’ll give it a try soon :)

That was one of the first things I wanted out of this project, so it would be amazing to get it going

What’s a good place to get/hold domains these days?