Since people started to report about Hivemind Communities, and with the tribes experience behind, I saw enough steemians asking if it is or will be possible to publish a post in more than one community.
From the information available, I knew this shouldn't be possible.
But testing always helps sediment or even create new knowledge.
So, today I went along with the idea that it would be possible to publish a post in at least two communities. How would you do it?
Well, this route has been walked on before, by tribes. You use one tag for each community. And since communities also use special tags -- kinda like tribes -- I thought we should explore this route, however improbable it looked.
The question was: would it work? Or do Hivemind Communities only work for primary tags, in which case testing ends with a failure.
The test was simple. I created this post:
The results, equally simple to verify. The new post showed up in community "hive-187795", but didn't appear in community "hive-144703" on a community-aware interface such as beta.steemit.com.
So, it doesn't work! Only the primary tag gives the community where the post is showed. Otherwise said, you can only post in one community at a time.
However, on an interface which doesn't support communities, both are treated as simple tags, and as such, you can view the posts by checking each of the corresponding tags.
Now, since we already have the tribe experience behind, let's look at the pros and cons of cross-posting compared to posting in one community, in my opinion.
Pros:
- Possibility to cross-post when content is at the border of several communities, which may be interested in it
- Possibility to reach a bigger audience
Cons:
- Makes spam easier
- Makes moderation harder
- One can see it as a way to reach a bigger audience, others can see it as unrelated content on their community feed
Overall I believe it's a good choice that cross-posting isn't allowed in communities. After all, we have both approaches, and we can choose what suites us. Either cross-post (or not, but you have the option!) using tribes, or you don't on communities.
I agree on the notion that we technically have both options available to us right now, thanks to tribes, but if in the future only one of these wins out (which'll probably be communities since it's native), I like the option of not cross-posting.
When you make a community-post, it should be primarily for that community, just like on Reddit. However, what's different & makes these better than on Reddit, is that we can also use hashtags, like Twitter or Instagram, to get additional engagement.
Best of both worlds :^)
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Very true. When I first saw communities out, but without having access to them, I thought there will be no hashtags. I'm glad they will continue to be available for communities as well.
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