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Russia-Ukraine War Mega Thread | June 25 - July 8 2023

Please confine all news pertaining to Russia-Ukraine war to this thread exclusively. Any links shared outside of this thread will be subject to removal.

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  • Hi all ... kind of a meta non-news question.

    I've been thinking about getting a person who writes great Russia-Ukraine threads over on Mastodon to post their threads here. I've got a general post about the possibility here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1528973.

    I've also pestered @[email protected] via DM.

    Just wondering what your thoughts are on whether there'd be a good fit here.

    The main point is to make it as easy as possible for them by allowing them to post from mastodon still. So the ideal would be that they would create new posts here and create a thread within that post, to which people would be free to comment on of course.

    Except that doesn't seem to fit within the rules here, especially rule [1.1] Submissions must be links to news articles..

    Thing is, this person's threads are full of citations of or links to Telegram sources from within Russia or the region, basically a thread of primary sources that the author is compiling into a digestible narrative. It might really be something people here would appreciate, especially as I discovered them through links provided in a megathread on here.

    Sooo ... I'm wondering what you think and whether there might be some scope to alter the rules and allow for this sort of thing ... the idea would be that it's something like a journalist live reporting.

    • Hi,

      While Rule [1.1] applies to the main submission post, we would like to clarify that in the case of our mega thread, posting links to social media sources (such as Mastodon) is acceptable as they will be placed in the comments section of the thread.

      As of now, we don't have much experience with cross-posting from Mastodon to Lemmy. However, if you can provide us with some examples, we can explore the possibility of incorporating it in some way. Your input and examples would greatly assist us in understanding the process better and potentially adopting it within our community.

      • On posting directly to a megathread ... thanks! While this is good, and has already happened in megathreads (I forget which I saw it in), it doesn't lean into the federation of content that can happen which is what I'm trying to see more of. That is, not just "cross-posting" but the same thread existing on two platforms simultaneously in much the same way lemmy communities exist on multiple instances simultaneously.

        Otherwise, happy to talk about the mastodon<->lemmy "cross-posting".

        Here's a basic demo I've written, posting from Mastodon to [email protected] : https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095 And here's the view of the post on lemmy: https://lemmy.ml/post/1142168

        You'll see that both lemmy and mastodon users can comment or reply with the only difference being how the two platforms display the threads (lemmy doing a much nicer job IMO)

        The key machansim is that lemmy communities federate to mastodon as "users" that can be "at-ed" like any other user from mastodon. Lemmy then interprets such a post as a new post to the "at-ed" community, takes the first line as the title and the rest as the body. The only trickiness is that lemmy will only pay attention to the first "at-ed" handle, to prevent cross-posting and spam.

        What I initially imagined was that someone could start their own journalistic megathreads here by doing exactly the above and then replying to their previous post to create a thread on mastodon and a chain of comments to a "megathread" post here on lemmy. This would be the easiest for the person posting from mastodon.

        The difficulty for you is that it would be a post that isn't necessarily to a news source, but just a stand alone post ... though the person I'm asking on behalf of is almost always providing sources/links.

        Beyond that there'd be your policy of confining all Russia-Ukraine war stuff to the megathread. On this, they could reply to the megathread and basically embed their mastodon thread within the megathread. This would work well. It's just that finding the megathread from mastodon and replying to it can be non-trivial and may not be available all the time.

        For instance, I can't find the current megathread on my mastodon account and I don't know why ... it's probably an instance visibility problem and will get better now that I've subscribed/followed [email protected] from my mastodon instance. So this may become a good way forward without much hassle.

        As for the kind of threads I'm thinking of ... here's an example: https://hachyderm.io/@mariyadelano/110599817912125441

        • Also ... just to be clear ... I'm kind of being a "go-between" here, because I think this sort of thing could be good for the fediverse at large and lemmy too! I'm not the one writing these threads, but I'm talking to the author and suggesting this to them too.

119 comments