It was noted that there were some social barriers that would be crossed if federated cross-posting were implemented.
Namely, tribalism exists in all corners of the fediverse (related; see Jaz’ “million fediverses” blog post). It is more pronounced in the threadiverse because there are explicit fences around communities, e.g. sports team, political leanings, etc.
There is the potential for abuse to occur if cross-posting were made available to users. e.g. enabling dogpiling by cross-posting to a community who does not share the values of the original post.
In and of itself that’s not a reason to not move forward with this. I went ahead and implemented cross-posting in NodeBB itself, but only locally. That is, remote posts can be cross-posted to local categories, but not the other way around. It’s worth noting that me doing this already enables the dogpiling behaviour, though NodeBB forums in general aren’t really all that tribalistic so in practice there have been no issues.
As far as I know, Piefed and Lemmy still treat cross-posts as separate entities. However, they both have independent implementations where similar posts (those that have the same Link, I think) are “linked” in a manner of sorts. Browsing the comments of one post would show comments from similar posts across different communities.
NodeBB does not do this because we do not group content together by Link.
