Oh, interesting. I honestly just glazed over that every time, but you’re right that that’s a step in the right direction. What I’d really like is for the instance to go the next step further and merge the conversations visually.
So in my mind, at the top of any individual post you’d see the thumbnail and the link title; and then underneath that, as a special-looking top-level comment, it would show the post title and OP text for each incarnation of the post across various instances and communities. The replies to those individual posts are then all rolled up under their top-level comment.
You could roll Mastodon (and other Fediverse) posts in there, too; they would just appear as their own top-level comment, just like replying to Lemmy posts on Mastodon works currently.
I’m really excited to get time to check it out. Maybe this weekend.