This brainstorm is motivated by two recent discussions:
When is it time to switch away from youtube?
The conversations about YouTube alternatives and PeerTube’s limitations made me test the current state of Lemmy <--> PeerTube federation.
Federation already works quite well: you can pull in PeerTube channels, subscribe, upvote, and comment from Lemmy.
But I did notice one thing. Take this Techlore video on PeerTube:
https://techlore.tv/w/9a7d20d2-4cc1-4911-8fd7-0794d8fe3bd9
-> On PeerTube: 6 upvotes, 4 comments
I pulled the video into my instance and was able to upvote it from there, so federated voting is working well: https://mander.xyz/post/37959974
I then noticed it had also been cross-posted to lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/35205985
-> On lemmy.world: 37 upvotes, 9 comments
So the cross-post has significantly more engagement than the original video. This highlights a visibility issue: PeerTube creators may be getting more reach than they realize, but that engagement is fragmented across federated posts.
Brainstorm
Would it make sense to allow cross-posting of already-federated PeerTube content without breaking the link to the original object?
Upvotes/likes: These could be funneled back into the original PeerTube video, so creators get a true sense of their reach.
Comments: Less clear. Should all comments be merged into the video thread, or should they remain scoped to the Lemmy community they were posted in?
I don’t think this is “GitHub issue” ready, but it seems worth discussing.
Piefed you can comment and vote but its the same deal as lemmy. A cross post is a separate thing. So any interaction will only go to the cross post. Its a but better visually than Lemmy though.
I like it.
I find the feature of pulling comments from cross-posts even more desirable now that I see how it interfaces with PeerTube videos, pulling the comment history as well. I still think that improvements can be made. With regular cross-posts, you have different people sharing the same link, often to a resource outside of the Fediverse. But, in the case of a federated piece of content such as a PeerTube video, the original does live within the fediverse. There is a master post, which is the video itself. I feel like there is some way to design a special kind of fedi-cross post that allows to share with a community without breaking the interaction... At least for upvotes.