I’ve noticed occasionally well-meaning people trying to start communities, or move them to new instances, promptly filling the void in what I’d call “linkdumping”. This is when someone creates a bunch of link posts to a variety of articles, sometimes from a single site, but often from a few, all related to the community’s topic/focus. At a glance it’s similar to spam, but I think it’s sort of wrong to label it as such, as on further inspection you can tell that the intent is different.

Unfortunately linkdumping tends to overlook the impact this has on the community’s appearance to casual browsers, and how they’ll be able to maintain visibility after the initial spate of posts. Instead whenever possible I think people considering creating new communities should be encouraged to pace their posts throughout the day/week/etc.

That’s a little much to do manually, so that’s where pointing them to Lemmy Schedule, if the community is on a Lemmy site anyway, can help.

At the same time, it may be worth requesting that Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed devs consider adding post scheduling features for admins/moderators in some capacity. This would help those trying to build communities provide them with regular activity without having to do so manually and get burnt out.

But what do you think?

  • Skavau@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Post scheduling would be useful for many communities.

    I run television. It’s kinda easy for me. There’s usually a flood of news from the industry, renewals and reviews that come up daily. I post all that I think are relevant (some are just not interesting to most people), and once a day put out a general discussion thread.

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    8 days ago

    This is a massive issue for the !hardware@lemmy.world community.

    There needs to be scheduled posting functionality in the mainline webUI. Mobile app support would also help (unless some apps already support this, Voyager does not?).

    From what I understand you need to host Lemmy Schedule, while I have the skills to do so, this is not something I want to do just for scheduled posting functionality.

  • Elevator7009@ani.socialEnglish
    4·
    7 days ago

    In general, I feel a bit overwhelmed seeing a smaller community do a lot of posts in a single day. I expect it from big umbrella topics like video gaming in general, fitness, etc., big user base, naturally lots of people are going to have things they want to post and I should expect that. 10 posts from a niche community from the moderator… I like the spirit but you are drowning out all my other small communities ;-; I’d rather they spread them out with Lemmy Scheduler the way I do.

  • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
    4·
    8 days ago

    Yeah, I’m definitely guilty of daily linkdumping in the communities I’m growing. Scheduling posts would be a good feature, though that does run the risk of someone else posting the same link before the scheduled post is released. I wonder if it would be possible to have the scheduler check to see if a link has already been posted, and not post in those cases?