There will be some posters who washout from such tactics.
There are also posters who find it more sustainable when there is another poster around
Consolidation would benefit the community and likely help it grow further.
From the space consolidation thread a couple months ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42022359/18010213
Suppose I really dislike a community and I don’t want it to grow. I could make a bunch of similar communities all over the fediverse. Every time someone posts to the target community I could copy it to a new community every 15m making it look like spam, and diluting any community interaction. Basically I could dry out the human interaction by dosing the content.
You could. As it would be obvious that in this context you don't want to grow your community but just spam about the other one, there would probably get called out in a Meta thread in the community you dislike. People there would block your communities.
If we set the norm that top posting other people’s content systematically isn’t very Lemmy, then we would be in a good place to defend against such dilution.
That goes against the fundamental notion that everyone can start a community. Who decides what communities should stay, and which one should not? At the moment, people vote with their participation, everybody makes their own choices. What alternative do you suggest?
Sure, some front ends like piefed may help, but not everyone is going to be using those front ends
Piefed isn't only a frontend, it is a different platform.
The Lemmy devs recently stated that this is a client problem, and that they don't plan to change that
In lemmy-ui we’ve chosen to link the posts at the top rather than combine comment threads.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46984024/19528869
Long term, that will probably cost them, on top of the instance-wide bans regularly discussed.
Mbin has at similar approach where it is possible to see the number of comments on other communities:
The more I discuss this topic, the more I think this is a shortcoming of Lemmy rather than an issue with the people crossposting content.