@Dasus@lemmy.world @comicstrips@lemmy.world

Cross-posting and making seventeen posts is quite different.

How so?
Practically speaking, it’s ends up being shown in the same way.

And, again: Fediverse has these gaps of federation. We constantly see instances choosing to defederate from others because of conundra. And people are caught in the crossfire, people who got nothing to do with such conundra, so if they need to seek like-minded people on both sides of the island where the bridges were imploded and airspace is closed until further notice, they ought to cross-post.

Call it "making "+number2English(postAmount)+" posts" or “cross-posting”, this is but a byproduct of how Fediverse is organized in different, often unconnected islands. And you happens to be standing from a quite privileged position in an island where you got this panoramic view of all those air-gapped islands.

Sure, Lemmy front-end algorithms could somehow detect duplicates in the same page (perhaps using Set or something similar) and/or group them as tree-view (that is, something like Object.groupBy(), grouping similar posts, then rendering them under an accordion element). But it doesn’t happen this way. Nonetheless, that would make an interesting suggestion or PR to the Lemmy project.

And no, no-one cross-posts in a dozen and more communities

I can’t really link one right now but I swear I recall seeing posts with a literal dozen of cross-posts. Since I use three different Lemmy instances as a guest for reading the threadiverse (because I actually use Sharkey), such examples are buried in my browsing history. But believe me: this does happen.

And anyone who does it in more than three gets blocked, because that’s spam on Lemmy.

It depends. If you’re talking of the same instance or, especially, the same community, yeah it may be seen as spam and it may lead to deletion or bans.

But we’re talking about different instances, even different platforms (Bad Jlai comics were certainly replicated across Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, etc). And, again, your instance happens not to defederate from many instances, hence why you get to see more of the cross-posting phenomenon from where you’re standing.

Disclaimer: I myself don’t cross-post things, I don’t even do posts (I do more comments than posts here in the threadiverse), so I got no stakes on this matter, I’m just another person in this thread trying to add something to the explanation of how Lemmy works.