Having to expand it manually would help make the page look less cluttered. What I’m suggesting is that you have the Crossposts section at the bottom beneath the comments and for the user to be able to expand crossposts and read their post text and comments, essentially combining the crossposts display with the idea of fetching and showing comments from crossposts together.

I was checking Photon’s settings and I noticed they have this option

I know it’s unrelated but I thought it might interest you, and I don’t have a github account to open an issue.

I get it.

Photon example

There was some discussion about it in Dessalines’s recent post. The reason I think it might be visually overwhelming is because of long titles and because sometimes there are a dozen crossposts. Maybe something like Photon’s crossposts display can be combined with the other idea of showing comments from crossposts, two birds one stone kind of thing.

I’m just gonna copy a comment I made on Dessalines’s post:

Combine posts and not just comments.

In addition to my other suggestions I think showing crossposts with their own comments would be very easy to understand and no one would miss the context because the title and body text of each post would be there. Basically add a section at the end that says “Crossposts” and have a little 🛈 or � next to it that explains the whole thing, when you click on “Crossposts” it expands and shows post previews like when you’re browsing (with the + sign to see body text) and the comments appear below the preview. And this could be off by default so it wouldn’t confuse new users.

This is just feedback, I do appreciate your work, and I know implementing ideas is not always easy.

Looks good, I’m gonna ping @dessalines@lemmy.ml in case they didn’t see this comment.

Combine posts and not just comments.

In addition to my other suggestions I think showing crossposts with their own comments would be very easy to understand and no one would miss the context because the title and body text of each post would be there. Basically add a section at the end that says “Crossposts” and have a little 🛈 or � next to it that explains the whole thing, when you click on “Crossposts” it expands and shows post previews like when you’re browsing (with the + sign to see body text) and the comments appear below the preview. And this could be off by default so it wouldn’t confuse new users.

It just occurred to me that crossposts sometimes have different body texts and the comments could be in the context of that, and even if we disregard the comments altogether, you might still wanna read the body text. The convenience of having all comments grouped together would mean that no one will go check each crosspost and read its body text, how would you know that there is one anyway?

Maybe there could be a button that shows the body text of each crosspost, either as a popup or a collapsible block

Or for the new crosspost display to be collpased by default.

And how much space would this take on mobile?

Your proposal might be more visually appealing in certain cases but there is no clear visual explanation of what is going on. New users and people browsing without an account wouldn’t intuitively understand that these are comments from crossposts in federated instances (what does any of this mean?)

I made the same suggestion recently lol.

each comment section is contained in a box with a clickable header. Clicking the header collapses the shade, leaving only the header. Kind of like collapsing a comment.

I was just suggesting this but in general.

I think this would be visually overwhelming

Piefed’s implementation of this idea is a good place to start imo

Comments from crossposts are organized into sections according to each community and you can easily read a community’s sidebar by clicking on the icon next to it (red arrows). I think those sections should be collapsed by default, this way it would be harder for users not to notice that these are comments from a different community.

Here is something to consider, sometimes one link is posted multiple times to the same community, how would you deal with that?

Edit: When a user wants to reply to a comment from a crosspost there should be a reminder/indicator that this is a comment from a different community or something.

I made this suggestion recently. Have you seen the Piefed implementation though? You can see an example of it here.