Grand idea! I thought about this as well but a year ago nothing was there. Let's hope some hero comes to our aid!

Feel free to call out communities who should be consolidated.

That's probably the best option we have at the moment.

Mbin automatically groups posts from multiple communities with the same link. But that requires a full instance change for most.

Dunno but I think LemmyNSFW.com drops dups from the instance maybe even the broader. I doubt any combine comments but maybe a front end wizard has done it

Would be cool.

I think there's a lot of stuff you can do if you think a bit differently about Lemmy when you create an app.

There's no real reason why you should treat each instance as separate entities.

Multi-communities in one form or another with this sort of functionality is sorely needed to be honest, whether from an app or (ideally) from Lemmy itself. But I suppose it's not trivial to implement.

i've thought for a while now that lemmy's consolidating feature should have been tags rather than communities. that way posts from every server with the same tag would be in the same group, and cross-posts would have the same id so users could filter out duplicates and comments would be visible from every tag.

There used to be an app called Loom that was in beta. It allowed you to create custom feeds of specific communities you want to see all together. Unfortunately the beta expired and I haven't heard from it since. Hopefully someone comes up with a similar app in the future.

I wish this were a thing

Mlem dev here.

Edit: whoops, I feel for Lemmy’s labeling. TIL Lemmy doesn’t have a real concept of a crosspost, and instead proxies the concept by matching urls.

~~This feature, as suggested, presents a fundamental technical problem: frontend clients load posts a page at a time, and so are only aware of the posts you’ve already scrolled past and the ~20-50 posts ahead in the feed. It’s therefore not possible to find all posts with the same URL and aggregate their comments into a single chain under the first occurrence of the URL, at least not without loading infeasible amounts of data ahead of time.~~

We have this feature planned! our comments view also currently shows the list of crossposts and indicates the number of comments on each one.

Alternatively, a filter that only shows posts with comments

That’s a good idea, we’ll add it to a future build.