I've been testing the in's and out's of the new Community system, and let me tell you it's very exciting! There are some details that you do need to know and understand so that you are able to post to the communities you want, and still have your posts visible on your blog. There are also some details about cross-posting that you should understand, and a few other things that I am going to share and explain. Before I go into details, let me explain the main differences between communities and blogs, and how to use them!
Communities
Think of communities as a special place to put something. Rather than sharing a post with the entire Steem ecosystem, when you post using a community page, or hive-tag your post does not appear on your blog feed. There is an option to share your community posts to your blog feed if you want, but you have to manually do that on each of your posts. If you do use other tags they WILL still appear in those feeds.
Make New Connections Easily!
One of the best things about communities is that you can see everyone who is subscribed on each community page. Previously we had no idea who was in who's groups, and it was hard to discover people who didn't post frequently. Now we can easily click and discover new people, as well as share slightly more privately in each community. It's also very easy now to view the entire feed of each community, all conveniently linked at the top of the page in the communities drop down menu.
One of the features (limitations) of Communities, at least right now, is that you can only post to one community with a post. If you use a community page to post from then just click the button on the page that says WRITE A POST. This will automatically assign it to the community and you are then free to use any other normal tags in the post. (see image below)
If you are using the standard post buttons outside the community then just use the interface to post to a specific community, You can choose whilst you post at the top. If you don't see the community you want to post to you may need to Subscribe to it. See image.
Adding a Community post to your blog feed
Once you have posted to a community you can easily share it to your blog by clicking 'Profile' and then clicking to view 'All Posts' . Find the post you just made and then choose the option to 'Add To Blog' should appear on your own posts. See image.
The hard part now will be deciding which community to post things on!
Cross-posting
The main thing to know is that cross-posting is more like normal posting rather than re-steeming! If you are on auto-votes, or have limited RC (resource credits) then be careful cross-posting. 90% the rewards on the post you cross-post will go to the author of the post. Also bear in mind that anything you cross-post to another group will have its own comments thread, separate from the original post.
Basically, RE-STEEMING is to share with BLOG TAGS and CROSS POSTING is to share with communities that you are subscribed to. When you cross post the the following things happen:
- The rewards start again for 7 days , (evergreened) 90% go to the original author, 5% to the cross poster, and i THINK that other 5% is to the community.
- The comments go to the Cross poster, not the author.
- Cross posting a post that is still live on votes can cause confusion or issues (e.g with auto-voters). If You are on auto-voters be aware you may trigger them on your cross post. which will mean you are donating those rewards to the author .
THE COMMENTS ON A CROSS-POSTED POST WILL COME TO THE PERSON WHO CROSS-POSTS AND NOT TO THE AUTHOR!
So, if you cross-post then you need to keep an eye on the comments from the post you have shared. If someone cross-posts one of your own posts, you will want to go to that post to see the comments.
Note that you should only cross-post a post once, and only after the 7 day payout (although it is possible to do it before).
Some people say it's bad etiquette to cross-post your own content but I think it's totally fine IF you want to get your post in a different community.. Otherwise how else to share it?
Badges
We now have the ability to receive or award badges to people! You may already see the ecoTrain badge, Natural Medicine Badge, TribeSteemUp Badge etc on some peoples profiles. Badges can be awarded for any reasons you wish, and ecoTrain is awarding people badges for their outstanding contributions to Steem and the community. If you are interested to see what the feed looks like for a community with just the people who have badges then just click on a badge and see! Its another way to find and view high value posts on Steem.
Blogs
This is the part of Steem that we all know and love! Things are much the same here as they were, and you could just keep posting blogs and ignoring communities. If you do this i think you will be missing out though, Communities are still very new, and so i think it's worth the time to Subscribe to a few and see how your Community Feed Looks! I think communities will play a big part of Steem, and we can already see that normal tags have completely gone from Steempeak.com. Now all the links are Communities and Tribes!
Info On the ecoTrain Community
You Can Subscribe and Post To Our ecoTrain Community Page here:
https://steempeak.com/c/hive-123046/about
If you are posting for an ecoTrain related post, especially the Question Of The Week, then you will need to post from our community page. We will be giving curating priority to our community and those of you who post on our community page. Finally we can all see who each other are and make some new connections! We support a wide range of topics, including
sustainability, community, self-sufficiency, off-grid living, eco-green, permaculture, inner transformation, alternative energy, alternative lifestyle, eco bulding (esp. earthships), recycling, esoteric, spiritual, nature - in short, all the practical and conceptual underpinnings of the eco paradigm shift.
If you write or post on any of these topics, or similar please do join us, subscribe to our community and lets reach out and expand the ecoTrain motto "Together we are helping make this world a better place"
If you want to read more check this post out from @jarvie
https://steempeak.com/hive-175001/@jarvie/choose-your-own-adventure
Thanks to....
I would like to say a huge thank-you to all the developers and team at Steempeak and Steemit who have made this happen. I have been waiting a long time to see these changes, and can already feel the difference in how much i want to engage with the ecosystem. What i feel using Steem now is that we have more cohesion and structure, and ability to find like minded people to connect with. We can join as many different communities as we like, so i don't see it as limiting at all! As a group leader of ecoTrain, I never really knew who was following us exactly, especially the people who didn't post much. Now I can already see everyone who has subscribed and am able to check their posts out and see who is with us... Very nice work guys!
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