The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.
Lemmy’s cross posts are separate posts that just happen to link to the same thing. so only replies to the original post would be sent with the current design.
that said, i severely doubt Lemmy will gain anything from this. publishers will not be sending out their posts to any communities, and i highly doubt they will expose any fep-1b12 group actors you can subscribe as a community.
kbin/mbin with it’s ability to follow users may work better, assuming people test their federation with software other than mastodon, and accept any of the interoperability bugs as actual bugs instead of ignoring them. (lemmy itself is no stranger to this: the fact that users and communities can share the same username break quite a bit)
I know this is a late reply but Lemmy recently gained support for wordpress blogs as communities so this will likely be positive for us here as well. Though it would be good if we had profile following and discovery similar to mbin and kbin in the future.