I’ve asked about this before, see my post history. But the fact that pixelfed, mastodon, and lemmy can all be subscribed to from one instance or another, isn’t a replacement for a “post once distribute everywhere” solution.
Yes its true that a pixelfed and a mastodon can follow one another and because you can post images to mastodon and pixelfed images can have text they can often be basically identical in terms of potential feed content. But lemmy is something that I would post to communities.
It would be helpful if I could use an app to simultaneously post to my mastodon, my pixelfed, and to a range of lemmy communities and or cross posting between communities on lemmy.
I suggested in my previous post the ability to post to a mastodon with certain hashtags triggering getting sent to different lemmy communities. I think that still works as an idea but I think perhaps this new framing helps explain why it’s not as simple as “have them follow your pixelfed from their mastodon”. If posting once to distribute to both mastodon and lemmy community makes sense then I don’t see why it shouldn’t be reasonable that there are some cases where the same is true of pixelfed and mastodon (I said in response to one comment that you might have different audiences)
I think the biggest issue with lemmy so far is lack of content and engagement. Same thing is true with mastodon. The anti viral design ethos of mastodon encourages people to avoid tools like “post once distribute everywhere” I think perhaps people view it as potential for spam. But we really need some actual tools to make posting content easier.
You want content, you got to make it easy for people to post. I want to post my stuff to lemmy and mastodon but I find myself posting to centralized social media more because it’s just easier.
I think this honestly one of those things where open source people veer into snob territory. It’s like when people objected to making Linux desktop gui better because “you can do it in the terminal better!”
Adopting a more pluralistic view it ux would be wise imo. I don’t think the fediverse has a spam problem. It has a “not enough content” problem.
Maybe I am a snob, but I really don’t think the Fediverse (or Lemmy) has a content problem.
Yes you can reach the end of your new posts feed pretty quickly and there isn’t an endless stream of algorithmically curated Tiktok videos, but those feel more like features to me.
And I am not even (only) thinking that less might be better when it comes to social media… it is also a question of if a medium is primarily one of active contributions or one of passive consumption (with a few “influencers” creating all the content).
At the end of the day I want to post content and the fediverse doesn’t make it easy as it could be. I share your anti-spam values but I think you really just got to open up your mind a little that other people have other needs from ui and trying to force a single solution as canonical becsuse you don’t personally need it is short sighted.
That said this is open source so I could just make the solution myself it’s just I’m lazy and not really technically competent enough to take it on at this time.
I will say I run a mastodon for a labor organization. And the needs of an org are different than the needs of an individual. Orgs pay people to post. Yes this sucks because it means brands get on social media but there’s also lots of orgs that are non profit or activist focused. And where are they going to go when they want to post? Not the fediverse if the centralized media is easier.
A mailing list can work for an open source project but github/lab is easier. You want a vibrant open source project you can’t just throw up barriers and then expect people to crawl over them because you personally prefer a mailing list. That doesn’t mean that mailing lists are bad but it’s that pluralism is necessary in open source ux. Ultimately the goal should be to give the users the power over their own experience.
I think you need to explain a bit better what you mean with “easier”. Because your original post seems to be not about making it “easier to post”, but to make it “easier to post automatically on multiple sites”.
The former is a UI issue that can the worked on, while the latter is IMHO an anti-feature that makes it easier to spam without actually doing any meaningful engagement.
I don’t think being able to post to multiple communities is an anti feature. Like I said there are plenty of legit uses for it.