One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it's a bit less obvious because there's a wider range of subjects involved.
Except now, it doesn't, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.
We're still figuring out whether it's a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It's a tricky UX and social question.
I've held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it'll be added soon.
Yes I'm concerned about that too. So far the only thing I can think of is to add a "Rules" link right after the community headline, which would display the community sidebar text (where Lemmy communities often-but-not-always have their rules).
In PieFed communities have two separate sidebar fields - one for the community description and another for the community rules. So we can do a better job of finding the rules for those communities although they are very few at the moment.
Neither of these address instance-specific rules which can actually be more important a lot of the time...
It's a tricky one.
I think instance-specific rules are largely ignored anyway - we don't really check the home. Instance of communities and go there to read their rules before posting. If it's clear which community you're posting to and the rules of that community are visible, I'd say that's plenty. :)
That's great! I did a test edit and everything is looking functional. As you say the rules issue raises concerning points - perhaps the desktop could be made nice but then how will a mobile device handle it, etc. Lots to think about there.:-)