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?
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!
Had a quick look because I was confused.
All posts show as “crossposted to:” in the small space between the Fediverse, star etc icons and the post
What did not happen in your case is having “crossposted from” in the body of the text. Probably a client issue indeed (or maybe a decision, as IIRC Thunder aggregates comments from all crossposts together? Or maybe it’s another client?)
The body of posts is submitted by the user. I’ve personally never noticed “crossposted from” in the body of a post. Whereas the crossposted metadata is stored separately on the server.
If the post body is empty, nothing happens.
Otherwise:
Even here, clicking on the crosspost icon from the web UI creates this:
Edit: Maybe I misunderstood. Are you implying that Thunder does this, too, but only if there’s already content in the post body?
Ah, sounds like it’s a web UI front-end feature then. It just sticks that text in there for you. That’s odd when there’s back-end data that contains the cross post information and accessible from the API.
(At least that’s my assumption. Thunder shows crosspost data in a handy table. I feel certain it’s not generating this data on its own from some kind of search. The database must already contain this data and have an API for it, so why does the web UI stuff it into the post body at the same time?)
There is no special backend data, and lemmy makes no distinction between which post is “original” aside from the difference in the timestamp.
Lemmy simply hooks up all posts into cross-posts that link the same URL.
I have noticed that posts leading to the same URL all have that little “Cross-posted to:” indicator. Whether the post had actually been crossposted to the indicated community or if it had instead been crossposted from that community. Even if the post was not crossposted at all at any point, it will still read “Cross-posted to:” and list every other post with that URL.
So it that just Thunder doing that? Because it sounds like a great feature, maybe the wording is deceiving since its only technically a cross post. But its nice to see the together.
Could maybe be changed to Duplicate Post or something like that.
Yeah, what I just explained seems to be a Thunder-only thing. I really do like the ability to see the list of everywhere else that a certain URL has been posted to, but it would definitely be nice if it was more descriptive about the relationship between the posts
It’s on the Web UI as well
No. Thats how all cross-posts on lemmy work.
The “cross-posted from” does nothing, and is redundant.
Any client with proper cross-post metadata support will link to all other posts with the same URL in the same way.
