Just wondering if anyone has ideas around best practices for cross posting articles?

I recently setup [email protected] and mainly only post to that community, with no cross posting.

My thinking was that it’s probably best for subscribers/readers to crosspost to other communities, rather than me “spamming” the articles to other communities.

But I’m not sure it’s the best way to go, since it’s kind of hard to get traction with a new community initially.

Any thoughts on what is a good practice way to go about increasing visibility of the community a bit more, without annoying people? Or is it maybe best to stick to the current approach and let things happen organically?

Edit: I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to provide feedback on this post. I got a lot of useful info, and will incorporate your suggestions in future.

  • Ashtear@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    I think as long as the target community isn’t just cross-posts, it’s fine. There should be some quantity of original content (probably the higher the percentage, the better). Obvious exceptions for communities specializing in link aggregation.

    If you’re concerned about annoying the community you’re cross-posting from, I’d say don’t be. I view the cross-post line as a “communities you may be interested in” feature, and it’s easily ignored.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    Crossposting usually favors the older post in most UIs I’ve used. Which is good for general browsing but not ideal for growing a community. I feel like [email protected] suffers from this sometimes since articles shared there are also shared in other news / politics communities first.

    That’s to say I don’t really have an answer for you, lol, but subscribed.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      Crossposting usually favors the older post in most UIs I’ve used. Which is good for general browsing but not ideal for growing a community.

      Very true. At times I find myself trying to get another article on a topic so that the post is going to be its own and not hidden behind a crosspost.

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    Cross-posting causes the posts to be de-duplicated in most clients, which can mean that whichever post takes off, cannibalizes the votes from the others, meaning discovery suffers for the communities where the post didn’t take off.

    To work around this, I cross-post things that fit in many communities with a time delay of at least three hours.

    I post first to the smallest community, which allows that post to stand on its own, as much as it can, bringing users to that community. With few subs it’ll mostly get seen by people browsing all, rather than subscribers. Which is good, that’s how small communities get found by new subscribers.

    Then, once the first post to the actual community has stopped getting votes (which happens quicker the smaller the community) I cross post to the next biggest community. This consequent post often gets more attention, but it now links to the small community, which will be found by some fraction of users seeing the cross-post.

    You won’t annoy people too much doing this, as posts to small new communities don’t get seen by that many people before they essentially disappear from all. But as the community grows and votecounts increase, posts will gain more sustaining power as they sink slower the more votes they get.

    Eventually the subcount will get big enough that posts will stay fairly high in all for a good while due to subscribers upvoting them. At this point, you might start simultaneously posting to other communities.

    I also like to leave comments of posts in big communities, that could be cross-posted to a small community I know. I did this a lot with [email protected] so people posting and browsing to general gaming communities could find the new game community in the comments of relevant posts, and I’m fairly sure that’s why it is so active.

  • threelonmusketeersMEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    Some best practices I (try to) follow:

    • Post to the smallest community first
    • Add some body text

    This ensures that future crossposts quote the body text and include a link to the original post. (Not all clients do this automatically, but the official web interface does)

  • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    I do think people should crosspost more, and not just their own posts

    kinda off-topic, but lately when I do cross-posts I like to add the original community link at the top (just in case people are viewing from an instance that isn’t federated with it, or their client doesn’t show the cross-posts correctly)

    like if you crosspost this post, the default body text will start with:

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/29508559

    but you could add the community like this

    cross-posted from: [email protected] | https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/29508559

    been thinking of submitting a pull request to do this automatically, but I’d have to setup my test environment again… if anyone wants to do this, the code is here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/0.19.6-beta.9/src/shared/components/post/post-listing.tsx#L956-L965 in the crossPostBody function, it might be good at least until Lemmy supports instance-agnostic links to posts