I want to try asking more questions online since it has become so difficult to find things with search engines.

But I don’t really know where to post my questions?
How do you decide what community to post to?

For example:
I have a question about meditation.
This looks pretty straightforward, I search for ‘meditation’ under all communities.
I find 2 communities called Meditation. (I can find more if I search on another lemmy instance, but they don’t seem to show up on my current instance)
Both of them look rather inactive.

Do I just post to both of them? Is it possible to post to multiple communities simultaneously?
Should I look for other communities, what to search for?

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      2·
      1 小时前

      Your instance claims to be running a PieFed fork.

      If the functions it inherits from PieFed are unchanged, this should be true:
      https://piefed.social/post/1134894

      Also checked in an alt account I have in a PieFed instance and indeed, the button only appears when it is a link post:

      • Auster@thebrainbin.org
        2·
        1 小时前

        @AloneDownUnder@quokk.au also, checking the post creation form from PieFed, near the bottom, it has a “tags” field. If your instance inherits this too, I’d suggest adding tags related to your question, as then microblog users (e.g. from Mastodon and Misskey) may find your post too, to increase the reach of the post.

      • AloneDownUnder@quokk.auOPEnglish
        1·
        55 分钟前

        This would be helpful, but so it’s not possible if it’s a discussion post? I don’t see this button on this post for example.

        • Auster@thebrainbin.org
          2·
          51 分钟前

          Going by the post I linked, it appears to be a limitation on PieFed and seemingly also on its forks.

          I will open a feature request on Pavlova’s issue tracker from Codeberg.

          • AloneDownUnder@quokk.auOPEnglish
            1·
            49 分钟前

            Thanks, would be nice to see this in the future.
            So for now, should I just copy the link of my post and post it as a link post to other communities? Will that cross-post correctly?

            • Auster@thebrainbin.org
              1·
              23 分钟前

              The feature request:
              https://codeberg.org/quokkau/Pavlova/issues/3

              About your idea, let me try to explain:
              When you make a post in PieFed, and presumably to Pavlova, there’s a form you need to fill.
              This form has fields like title, tags, link, etc. which you fill to publish as a post, similar to Reddit.
              And also similar to Reddit, it has different types of forms for different types of posts.
              If you want to post, e.g., an article from PC Gamer, you’d usually pick the link form. If you just want to ask or say something, you pick the discussion form. And so on.
              Your post would be your own words, so linking elsewhere would already be hardly justifiable.
              And if you make a discussion post, you can’t cross-post.
              If you make a post in one of the two meditation communities and then link it on the post to the other, I can think of 3 problems.
              First, there wouldn’t be any other communities to cross-post to.
              Second, it could be seen as offensive to the second community and any tangential ones you cross-post to, as you’d be leeching the given communities by indirectly saying “go to this community to interact”.
              Third, it could be seen as spam.

              As community-based fediverse instances often group similar posts together, personally I’d suggest to just manually make the same post as a discussion post on both communities. Or pick the bigger of the two, either by subscribers or monthly active users (MAU).