Comment on I think thread deletion is problematic and needs some consideration and changes
Nothing4You@programming.dev 1 month agoit doesn’t matter whether you consider it reasonable, as it’s this way for technical reasons.
when a post or comment are created they are created on the users instance. the users instance then tells the community instance about the new post/comment and the community instance relays (announces) this to other instances that have community subscribers.
the fedilink is an id and reference to the original item. this unique id is known to all servers that know about this comment and it is what is used when updates to the post are distributed. except for the reference to the item on the originating instance, no instance stores information about where to find a specific post/comment on a random other instance.
MaximilianKohler@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It sounds like you’re saying it’s impossible, but I’m doubtful of that. Currently there is no fediverse link for the thread, so I think one could be added that links to the lemmy.ml post. I crossposted from lemmy.ml and the crosspost should say so.
If the devs conclude it’s not possible or wanted, that’s fine. But this is my feedback.
Nothing4You@programming.dev 1 month ago
I’m not saying it’s technically impossible, although it would likely be a bit challenging to integrate on the technical level, as the community instance has no authority to modify the post itself other than removing it from the community at this point.
The existing fedilink is already present for technical reasons anyway, so this is currently only showing existing data.
Why would you want a lemmy.ml link though? On Lemmy you’re typically intending to stay on your own instance, which many third party apps already implement. For Lemmy UI there is already a feature request to implement this, although it might still take some time to get done. If you have the canonical link to an object (which will always point to the users instance) Lemmy can look up which post/comment you’re referring to in its db without any network calls when it already knows about the entry. If you were linking to the lemmy.ml version of that post then the instance would first have to do a network request to resolve that and then it would realize it’s actually the lemmy.world version that it may or may not know about already.
MaximilianKohler@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s where the thread is. It was created on lemmy.ml and crossposted to lemmy.world. When crossposting from lemmy.ml to lemmy.world it says “crossposted from lemmy.world”, which is wrong and confusing, and defeats the purpose of crossposting (informing people about similar communities or other instances).
Nothing4You@programming.dev 1 month ago
Except it wasn’t created on lemmy.ml, it was created on lemmy.world.
lemmy.world then informed lemmy.ml that it is intended to be published in the community that it was created for.
It doesn’t say “crossposted from lemmy.world” but “crossposted from canonical_post_url”. This is not wrong in any way, although it might be a bit confusing and could likely be improved by including a reference to the community. The instance domain should for the most part just be a technical detail there.
It should also be noted that this format of crossposting is an implementation detail of Lemmy-UI and other clients may handle it differently (if they’re implementing crossposting in the first place).