Fediverse @lemmy.ml ocean @lemmy.selfhostcat.com 4w ago

Does it make sense to cross post to most than one community to read the most people and contribute to Lemmy being active or is that spam?

I used to just post on .world but disagree with some of their admin and mod policies so I try to post on .ml then cross post. Is it worth cross posting to even small instances or should I expect their users are on the bigger communities too? I don’t want to spam but only posting in .world misses the point of decentralization

27 comments

People almost never seem to mind when something’s posted to two communities. Sometimes people will complain when it’s three communities. Any more than is likely to annoy people who browse by “All,” and then the mods will have reports in their inboxes to deal with.
- Thanks for sharing your thoughts. My case was selfhosted for ml, world, then slrpnk. Usually just two the first too but thought it might be nice to contribute to the last one.
  
  As someone on slrpnk I definitely appreciate people posting to our communities!
- I was once asked to not post within a few seconds. Since then I've made a habit of waiting a few minutes between posts, since then I've not gotten any complaints.
A lot of clients filter out the 2nd, 3rd.. instance of crossposted posts in their main feeds, so only the first one gets shown. Therefore if I crosspost I do it the following way:

First post it in a small community. All people who are subscribed to this community will see the post in this community.

Then crosspost to a bigger community. Everyone not subscribed to the first small community will see the post in here.
- A lot of clients filter out the 2nd, 3rd.. instance of crossposted posts in their main feeds
  
  Which client does that?
  
  The default Lemmy-UI (website), IDK about others
  
  I’d also like to know
- That’s smart! I was doing ml then world. Maybe I’ll go even smaller :)
IMO its a good idea to cross-post to many communities across the fediverse, but as @davel pointed out, it can look like spam if its to a lot of only tangentially related communities.
- Thanks for your input!
  
  Tangentially? I don’t think that was said. But I get your point :) don’t want to do that!
It annoys me but I overlook it because lemmy is small. I understand why people are looking for max exposure.
- Yeah it can annoy me too but also why would I only post in the small community instance. That’s why I ask. Want to decentralize and be engaging
Hear me out.

A post has to be visually aggregated among several communities.

The current visual representation of a post that was posted in several communities looks like spam.

It would be nice for a post to have a field, that represents the community IDs of where the post was posted, and these communities should be visible as a list inside the post along with the stats (votes, comments, whether the post was removed from a community).

Navigating through items in this list of post-clones should bring the user to the same post in these communities.

A user would see the post in the feed if they are following at least one community the post was posted on.

The sorting could count the highest or freshest stats, depending on the sorting method the user chose in their feed.

A post should be possible to post in another community just by editing the "post in these communities" field while editing the post.

A re-post by another user should be possible and should just add the newly posted community to the field along with the already posted communities. One community should not be allowed for a post twice.

Lemmy clients should offer users to edit this field in their newly created post instead of copying the post multiple times.

This way the spam would look like spam and a post can have 20000 communities it was posted on and this won't clutter the user feed.

Thank you.
- That would make a lot of sense. Be federated to each of the respective communities.
I don't say anything, but I block people who do that.
Depends how active the non-LW communities are

!movies@lemm.ee has 931 weekly active users / 2.5k monthly compared to 644 weekly active users / 1.5k monthly for !movies@lemmy.world

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=movies&order=active

In this case you could only post to the Lemm.ee version.

There are cases where it's the opposite ( !parenting@lemmy.world , !homeimprovement@lemmy.world , !photography@lemmy.world ). In those cases I would only post on the LW community
- The question isn’t just anti world decentralization but just spreading it in general to reach each community :)
  
  For that, I prefer to generally post on one community.
  
  Crossposting seems to indicate that two communities should be consolidated.
- Thanks for the examples! So would you say cross posting is helpful or annoying?
  
  As I said, depends on the context 😄
2 is fine, 3 is borderline spam. 4 is a blocked user.

27 comments