So I'm actually against this idea. For some communities, the subject is the important thing. But for others, they're competing and they have different standards. Take memes for example. There's a memes community on every instance. Why would Star Trek memes be grouped with Solar Punk memes?
What I would say, is that some people are still stuck on the idea of karma and so they're desperately trying to spam their posts in every relevant community like clout matters. What they'll eventually realise is that they're just spreading their engagement and failing to support any of the moderators.
I think the point isnt all cross posts are collapsed into one, but that all identically named communities with identical posts are collapsed into one, and if you reply to a user then your comment goes to the relevant community that hosted that particular post (amongst all the other cross posts)
Good point, maybe in such a scenario a drop down box with tick boxes to select which community or combination of communities to upload as a top comment
Okay, so if I build a community and someone decides to build the same community on another instance, if they post stuff to both communities, there's a chance my stuff will be treated as the copycat and I lose traffic despite having built a massive community? It just seems like you're punishing me rather than the spammer.
I dont think it would count as you losing traffic, I would assume such a method would be done client side, and in such a case both communities would gain traffic