tl;dr — how do PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin handle cross-posting?
Currently, when a NodeBB admin moves a topic from the uncategorized pseudo-category into a local category, we federate out an as:Announce, people typically think of that as a "boost" or "share".
That worked fine when the entirety of the category list was your local categories plus the "uncategorized" pseudo-category. However, now that NodeBB is moving towards supporting remote categories (via group actors), this UX makes less sense. We wouldn't want to "move" a topic out of the category it is supposed to be in, just for visibility to other local users. Additionally, topic moving was limited to administrators, and from the get-go we knew it would eventually cause issues because people other than admins would want to share topics to other local users.
This is where the "cross-post" functionality comes in, which is entirely new to NodeBB. I don't think this is new to other AP-enabled threaded discussion software. The idea would be that if a new topic comes in, whether it's uncategorized or not, any user could "cross-post" that topic to a local category, where it would be visible to other users on that instance. On the ActivityPub side, we would then federate out an as:Announce as we already do.
Is this what PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin already do, if they support cross-posting? What other alternative solutions would there be to this problem?
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Cross-posts are entirely new and separate posts from their originals.
@[email protected] excellent... yes this is the kind of difference I'd love to explore and potentially put together an FEP for...
Hmm... considering that Piefed cross-posts are entirely separate posts, then if the original is edited, then the modification is not carried over to the cross-posted post, correct?
I'm thinking that for NodeBB we could continue to have cross-posts reference the canonical topic. They'd simply be part of a separate audience as well.
Whether this is local-only or not, I am not sure yet. Perhaps for federation purposes we'd still report the original category (if there is one) under
audienceYes the modification is not carried over and the cross-post will often have a different author from the original too. While creating the cross-post the cross-poster could have edited the title and description, too. The only connection is that they have the same url (in the
attachment). Lemmy adds the text "cross-posted from link-to-original" to the beginning of the body content but it's just text, not an attribute on the Activity.Room for improvement!
Also moving what NodeBB calls a topic (a post in Lemmy/PieFed) from what NodeBB calls a category (community in Lemmy/PieFed) into a different category (without spawning a new topic or leaving the old copy behind) is much needed but not implemented in Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin.