1y ago

How to handle multiple magazines on the same subject but on different instances?

How do y'all handle reading and posting to multiple magazines on the same subject? As an example, 3D printing is a hobby of mine. I searched and found 3 different primary magazines and 2 adjacent (see below). Is there a point to the 2nd and 3rd most popular ones? Do I subscribe to them all? Do I post to one or to all? Do the lemmy.ml users see the lemmy.world posts? I'm confused.

3DPrinting@lemmy.world - 91 subscribers 3D Printing@lemmy.ml - 57 subscribers 3D printing - 50 subscribers Functional 3D Printing@kbin.social - 17 subscribers 3D Printing for All and Everything!@kbin.social - 2 subscribers

10 comments

I have a habit of sorting things out frequently. Spotify Playlists, YouTube Subscriptions, Subreddits. Every now and then I go through them all and throw things out the window I’m not interested in anymore.
So, when I signed up here I subscribed to anything that sounded promising. Some of these communities are exactly the same just on different instances.
Eventually one of them will be victorious and that’s gonna be the one I will continue to follow.
It’s pretty handy because I rather subscribe to stuff which I am not that interested in. Sometimes it prevails and I find something new to obsess over.

Sub to them all and pray for "multireddit"-type functionality in the future.

I'd say post in the biggest one, then crosspost to the others.
- Using the crosspost feature also makes them merge in some clients (or I expect it to in future versions), so it's the technically correct way if you want your post to reach the widest audience.
  Different instances and communities have varying rules so also the post may be allowed on lemmy.ml but not programming.dev or whatever, so I just subscribe to all of them anyway. There's only some minor UX issues with it, but lemmy is a bit of a UX mess in general because it's still so young.
- oh and also, yes lemmy.ml users can see whats happening on lemmy.world. AS LONG AS those two are not "defederated" meaning they are still connected to each other.
- I'd just post to the biggest one unless you have a specific reason to avoid that instance.

I have some duplicate communities as well. It would be handy to be able to group them, but at this point comments just show up on my subscribed front page with the rest of my subscribed communities. It's transparent there, but when you go to a particular community, you can only look at duplicates individually.

That's definitely on my Lemmy wishlist -- some way to create merged communities. As it is now, there's too much potential for fragmentation across instances.
As of now, I just subscribe to whichever instance's community is the most active / has the most subscribers, which feels sub-optimal.

10 comments