I feel like on mainstream social media this is done pretty thoughtlessly and it’s a norm but on Lemmy, with the much smaller userbase, I kinda felt like… it’s like riding on someone else’s coat tails? Or is it just me?
Edit: I specifically mean the Crosspost function.
Edit: of course if it’s artwork or text, obviously then I’d make it explicitly clear it’s not mine but I mean news articles, memes, things like that.
Cross posting generally has the opposite result from what I’ve seen. The bigger subs soak up all the eyes on the content and no one ever follows the link to the original to subscribe.
Like in theory it sounds great, but in reality it seems to work out the opposite and it hurts exposure because now the small subs don’t get that “big” for them post in their comm.
Personally, I usually do find new subs and subscribe because of cross posting.
I’m just going from my experience running comms and watching the sub growth. Some people do come, but I find the rate slows down compared to a successful post directly on the comm.
I think both of you have valid experiences. Not everyone uses social media the same way. From switching from being a lurker to being a poster, it’s gotten me to focus more on how people interact with content. I operate more like QuadratureSufer to find smaller creators, but plenty are going to do as you’ve seen of just subbing a few big groups and letting content trickle up to them. They’ll get the real popular stuff, but may miss things people subbing to the source will get to enjoy.
Ultimately both are valid approaches, but if nothing ever gets crossposted up to the big subs, that’s just less eyes possible on the small subs for people that dont browse way down /All. Posting something from a big comm down to a small one doesn’t seem beneficial since why would one interact with it on the small comm when there will be less commenting going on there? That’s my personal thoughts at least.