I would love to be more active in posting links to articles and websites I find interesting to the fediverse, but I find that searching for the appropriate community can be a hassle. With so many different instances hosting the same communities, it can be difficult to know where to post. Is there a Firefox extension that would allow me to quickly and easily post links to a single Lemmy community (for example https://reddthat.com/c/random)? I’m envisioning something like a bookmarking tool that lets me post the website I’m viewing with a single click. If there isn’t an existing extension that does this, I’d be interested in finding a similar program that I could use for inspiration to create one myself.
i hope not. people should invest little but more effort and thought into creating post for other people than they do into creating their personal bookmarks.
I agree. many times I see communities that the only activity is link posting. not even comments.
i kinda understand that to be the case somewhere, starting new community is not easy.
i was thinking more about posts where you have some headline, no picture, the post’s body is “click here to prove you are not a bot”, and the poster didn’t care enough to fix that.
I think the “prove you are not a bot” and the preview picture (if any) are often automatically-added. It gets complicated, bc the picture (for example) MAY be added by the posting software and/or the server, and the picture may or may not propagate. Whether or not this happens depends on the version (of posting software and server), how it was configured, and where it is hosted. Sometimes, the preview will not be generated because the content being previewed will disallow this – for example, youtube previews on !fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee used to be automatically generated, but I think youtube changed something so that doesn’t happen any more. Furthermore, the reading client will sometimes generate preview pictures anyway. CAVEAT: I only partially understand all this.
Summary: preview generation on the fediverse is a complex issue.
and when any of what you said happens, you go and manually edit it. that is the effort i am talking about.
Same, I am not a fan of a post being only some link. Bring some of your perspective into it, even if its just 2 sentences.
Sometimes all thats relevant is the link, or the commentary would be more appropriate as a comment. For example, posting a news article to a news community or a set of patchnotes to a game’s community. At least personally, thats the majority of what I want to see: a post with a bunch of fairly direct information, and discussion of its implications in the comments.