When scrolling all it’s common to see the same article posted several times, each from a different community and most with zero comments.

Is there an app that will recognise the post URLs, show that post only once in the scroll but display all the comments, perhaps with each having the community name prepended?

I usually only read the comments so there’s a lot of useless scrolling if skipping zero comment posts.

Alternatively, a filter that only shows posts with comments.

  • Eric@lemmy.ml
    1·
    5 days ago

    Mlem dev here.

    This feature, as suggested, presents a fundamental technical problem: frontend clients load posts a page at a time, and so are only aware of the posts you’ve already scrolled past and the ~20-50 posts ahead in the feed. It’s therefore not possible to find all posts with the same URL and aggregate their comments into a single chain under the first occurrence of the URL, at least not without loading infeasible amounts of data ahead of time.

    We do have a merged crossposts feature planned, which achieves the same basic functionality but using the backend crosspost data rather than absolute URLs; our comments view also currently shows the list of crossposts and indicates the number of comments on each one.

    Alternatively, a filter that only shows posts with comments

    That’s a good idea, we’ll add it to a future build.

    • threelonmusketeersEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      It’s therefore not possible to find all posts with the same URL

      The default web interface for Lemmy does list other communities a URL was posted to (even if not crossposted), though I’m not sure how it does this. Might there be some way to tap into that system?

      • Eric@lemmy.ml
        2·
        4 days ago

        Do you have an example of a post where lemmy-ui does this? I’d love to look into how they implement it but I can’t find an example of the feature in action.

          • Eric@lemmy.ml
            2·
            3 days ago

            Thanks! I totally fell for the “crosspost” label—I didn’t realize Lemmy just uses that term to mean “posts with the same link.”

            The merged crossposts feature we have planned is actually exactly what you’re asking for then, since that’s what Lemmy means by a crosspost.

            • threelonmusketeersEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              since that’s what Lemmy means by a crosspost

              Somewhat confusingly, Lemmy also has a “crosspost” button which seems to do the following:

              • Bring the user to the “create post” interface
              • Autopopulate the Title and URL fields
              • If and only if the original post contains body text, autopopulate the body field with a link to the original Lemmy post and quote the body text from the original post.

              The user then chooses which community to post to.