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

NumbersMan@kbin.social to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 46 points –

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?

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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

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?

Yeah I do, might take some time to at least figure out how to post the top 3 posts of a community automagically. If it works OK I'll share the code and people can take it from there.

Thank you! I don't have any expertise so I can't help. But I think it would be useful to do top 10 (or maybe 20) posts of all time rather than 3. When starting a community, more content is needed.

Some way to automatically import the top post per day would probably be useful too but that's likely more complex.

Ooh I like the idea of a community starter too