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?
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:
That is interesting, thanks for figuring that out.
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.
Edit: Maybe I misunderstood. Are you implying that Thunder does this, too, but only if there’s already content in the post body?
Not sure about Thunder, but for the web UI, that’s what I’ve always noticed since as long as I’ve been using Lemmy
Huh, then you worded your comment kind of strangely.
In any case, I think the rest of my comment applies then. It’s a feature of the web UI and not one that is particularly useful in my opinion since the post already contains metadata about cross posts, and Thunder displays the age of all of the crossposts making it pretty easy to identify the original. (Unless the crosspost was done at the same time as the original post, which usually indicated the original author was posting it in several places at once, in which case which one is really “the original”?)
If the web UI doesn’t show this data, then that’s the fault of the web UI.
Thunder displays the age of all of the crossposts making it pretty easy to identify the original.
That’s probably the main difference here.
The web UI does not show the age of the crossposts, so I guess the devs used the “let’s inject the source in the body of the crossposts” as a workaround for that
On the other hand, having the web UI copy pasting the body of the source is still useful.
That’s why the commenter pointed it out on this comment: https://lemmy.ca/post/29880029/11900447 , as your crosspost was missing the additional information you added in the body of the original post
Edit: thought you were the OP, but that’s still valid
their crosspost was missing the additional information they added in the body of the original post
What do you mean “missing”? Are cross posts supposed to copy over the original post body? Post bodies often contain notes specifically for the community they are posted in and you wouldn’t want the original body. Just the link and your own post body. Even if they are copied, you can certainly remove that text and write your own. Hell, you could just delete the “crossposted from” note, too!
This is not a bug. It’s a tiny feature the web UI does that Thunder chose not to implement.
(I fixed your nouns in the quote. You should have just done that in your edit.)
Edit: indeed, the web UI quotes the entire original post body and adds the cross post note. You are free to delete all of it.
I realize, in this case, crossposting this post without also adding a body explaining the post is a little odd. But it’s always the poster’s choice to add or modify the post body after clicking crosspost. Could Thunder add a feature to copy the original body as a quote? Sure. But it’s not a big.
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, @[email protected] might be able to answer them!
I think you hit the nail on the head. I’ll just add for clarity that (unless something has changed) Lemmy can only determine cross-posts based on matching links (whether it’s an article, image, etc.). There is no way to correlate text cross-posts, which is why the UI (both the Lemmy web UI and Thunder) put the little “cross-posted from…” note in the body. At the very least, that helps the user find the original post from a cross-post, considering there is no special relationship in the back-end between cross-posted text posts.
Again, this was my understanding of how things worked last time I looked into this.
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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.
