Combine posts and not just comments.

In addition to my other suggestions I think showing crossposts with their own comments would very easy to understand and no one would miss the context because the title and body text of each post would be there. Basically add a section at the end that says “Crossposts” and have a little 🛈 or � next to it that explains the whole thing, when you click on “Crossposts” it expands and shows post previews like when you’re browsing (with the + sign to see body text) and the comments appear below the preview. And this could be off by default so it wouldn’t confuse new users.

It just occurred to me that crossposts sometimes have different body texts and the comments could be in the context of that, and even if we disregard the comments altogether, you might still wanna read the body text. The convenience of having all comments grouped together would mean that no one will go check each crosspost and read its body text, how would you know that there is one anyway?

Maybe there could be a button that shows the body text of each crosspost, either as a popup or a collapsible block

Or for the new crosspost display to be collpased by default.

And how much space would this take on mobile?

Your proposal might be more visually appealing in certain cases but there is no clear visual explanation of what is going on. New users and people browsing without an account wouldn’t intuitively understand that these are comments from crossposts in federated instances (what does any of this mean?)

I made the same suggestion recently lol.

each comment section is contained in a box with a clickable header. Clicking the header collapses the shade, leaving only the header. Kind of like collapsing a comment.

I was just suggesting this but in general.

I think this would be visually overwhelming

Piefed’s implementation of this idea is a good place to start imo

Comments from crossposts are organized into sections according to each community and you can easily read a community’s sidebar by clicking on the icon next to it (red arrows). I think those sections should be collapsed by default, this way it would be harder for users not to notice that these are comments from a different community.

Here is something to consider, sometimes one link is posted multiple times to the same community, how would you deal with that?

Edit: When a user wants to reply to a comment from a crosspost there should be a reminder/indicator that this is a comment from a different community or something.

I made this suggestion recently. Have you seen the Piefed implementation though? You can see an example of it here.