Title. I’m wondering what’s everyone’s take on this. On the one hand it’d mean seeing multiples of one post if you’re subscribed to equivalent communities between communities. On the other hand, right now I think a big worry is this momentum we have dying out due to lack of content.
We can’t possibly predict which community will be the “big” community across the Fediverse, so maybe cross-posts are the way to go until things grow big enough.
Thoughts?
Yes, absolutely! Although, I don’t get this “there must be only one” mentality regarding communities. R*ddit had competing subreddits, since the organizational structure was ripe for mod abuse, and the community often made an alternative. Worrying about duplicate communities kinda misses the point of site federation.
People typically don’t want to subscribe to 20 different communities on 10 different instances and get a bunch of double, triple or quadruple posted threads. So they rather want that one place that keeps them informed the most without any duplicates.
Then block all other instances and keep the one that is most relevant, if you are that bothered with cross posts. Frankly, the main value of link aggregator sites are the comments, and having multiple instances can be great for making comparisons.
There are situations where it can be helpful, but in general I don’t think intentional cross-posting is going to help. It could just as easily homogenize the communities and stifle what momentum we do have.
Communities will establish themselves organically over time, as we’ve seen with every platform before this. Trying to force it, or really influence the process at all, is just as likely to rub some folks the wrong way and lead to more fragmentation.
Until things settle, it seems like a more effective tactic is to choose where you want to focus your attention and add to the content in a natural way. Instead of cross-posting, just decide on a “main” community for any given topic for yourself and contribute there in a meaningful way. If another community in the same space looks like it’s taking over, reevaluate where you want to place your focus. Help build somewhere for the sake of building, but not for the sake of the numbers.
Alternatively, just ignore the “problem” completely and trust the process. Post in the first relevant community that springs to mind. Engage with posts as they come through your feed without paying any mind to the size of the source. The most important thing is increasing total user count across the Fediverse, and diverse activity can be a huge drive for that.
I would personally choose one or two of the biggest, most active ones, and then cross-post.
Quantity comes first, then quality.
Right now, exactly this. Quality posts will still be upvoted to the top no matter what. Communities need content to make them interesting, and I’m not talking about communities like this one, as it’s pretty active. Smaller communities need bigger support and more content, quality or not, crosspost or not. That’s what would make them more findable and “scrollable” which, in turn, would make them more likely to get the quality content they need.
I think this is my take as well. It’s probably worth it to post to the top two or so, if there isn’t a clearly active one.
Eventually this might have to flip if we manage to grow big enough.
It will probably continue until communities start to ban reposting/crossposting, imho. That would also probably be a visible milestone in our instance haha
I think it’d be nice to have a thing for communities/magazines to be discovered. I feel like there’s way more people on lemmy, so our kbin magazines get ignored by a lot of lemmy people. is there a way to share it with them and make it more discoverable?
Well, there’s this place:
- link for kbinauts: New Communities
- link for lemmings: New Communities
My new community got quite a few subscribers from there. Just make sure to post relative links using both the Lemmy and kbin routes (
/c/and/m/).EDIT: oh, I almost forgot, there actually is a site for community discovery: Lemmy Browser. I don’t think it currently lists kbin communities but we could ask them to (or if it’s open source, someone could implement it).
I’ll definitely post some communities there :) I think it’s easy enough to discover lemmy communities, I just feel that kbin magazines ain’t getting as much love haha.
Realistically, I feel like having a common link syntax must either exist – I haven’t really familiarized myself with the syntax yet – or is gonna get sorted out soon.
