2y ago

Should we be cross-posting to equivalent communities between instances?

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?

45 comments

I would personally choose one or two of the biggest, most active ones, and then cross-post.
Quantity comes first, then quality.
- 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.
- Should we also try to automate to populate communities? There's probably rss-type bots out there for news articles etc. But could also proxy some stuff over from certain subreddits (not through an api but just scraping). Not sure how people view that behavior.
  
  i personally think that would help, but I don't have the technical know-how to do it. Do you?
- Maybe why Reddit encouraged it with karma.
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.
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).
  
  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.
  
  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.
Yes, absolutely! Not only does this help with content, but also discovery letting you know where you found something.
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.
We should all help grow communities.
If there are multiple communities (like technology) I would cross post amongst a few big ones.
If things are being tagged, they should be picked up in related threads within magazines and microblogs (on kbin, but I think in other instances, too). So tag a lot.
- Could you explain this further, or post a link to the relevant documentation. I'm not sure how the tags system works but if it makes things more convenient it might be worth it to look into that.
  
  Sure, this talks briefly about tags. I'm trying to find the guide for new users that was written early this week, but can't at the moment. I believe it talked more about them. When posting on kbin, add tags to the tags field. Try to make them relevant and likely that someone has set their magazine or other instance community to look for it.
  Edit: This is also how Related Magazines and Related Threads are pulled into the sidebar within magazines.
  Edit 2: There's also /m/gettingstarted but they don't have a ton of stuff there, though they do link to that FAQ above.
  Edit 3: To see if a tag will work for your purposes this is the link: https://kbin.social/tag/food where you replace "food" with whatever your tag is. This lets you see where people are posting about that as well as what kind of content will pull into your magazine if you use that tag in your magazine settings.
Absolutely! If you know other communities related to the one you are posting go for it.
I was thinking earlier that it would be nice if magazines that cover the same or similar topics could choose to federate to centralize related discussions. The communities would also have the freedom to defederate from other magazines of their respective communities that get too toxic or lack moderation.
I feel like it will sort itself out over time.
Reddit did cross-posting too (even had actual mechanics to do it). Even for particularly popular topics usually only 2 top made it to the front page. If we're seeing more than that, it's probably just because there's not enough content yet to compete with it.
- Lemmy also has a mechanism to do it, but the icon is different, it’s two squares instead of a forking arrow.
It varies, depending on the circumstances. Some things, like art, or article links can be cross posted, but I don't know about mirroring literally everything across. That seems excessive.
Ideally there would be some unique content here, or there to encourage people to actually come over to this side of things.
OK, dumb question probably but a quick web search did not help me (also my fault probably). But how do you crosspost? Do you need to @ place the other community names in the Subject or in the Tags or in the Text of your post?
- I don't think it's implemented here yet. There are open issues at codeberg though.
  
  I see. Thank you for your reply, also to @grus. I will go the manual route for now too until we can do it right from our posts :-)
- I honestly don't know either, what I did to "crosspost" was actually just double posting. First posting to kbin.social own magazine /m/Ukraine and then I accessed beehaw.org's /c/news community through our kbin instance by going to https://kbin.social/m/news@beehaw.org and did another identical post there.
  If anyone has an easier way, please let me know lol.
  Also, I think a crosspost button of sorts should be useful in he future, or a button to show in which other communities a certain link was posted - that'd actually help spread word of certain communities and could be quite useful.
- You use tags. You can see this for yourself if you want to know if a tag will get picked up and where it might either pull from or go to: https://kbin.social/tag/food. This FAQ talks about how tags work.
  
  Thank you, using tags is a good idea. Unfortunately I did not find a way yet to "follow" tags or "subscribe" to them like I can do with Magazines. If this is possible and people would use it, then this would be even more powerful than crossposting. I'm learning new stuff every day, this feels a bit like the early, magical days of the www. There´s so much to learn and discover :-)

45 comments