HELLO & WELCOME to Alternative Nation, the Fediverse's largest alternative & indie music community!

We are all so happy you are here. You love music, we love music, and here we are, headphones on, in our own little world happily outside the mainstream while also supporting the growth of Lemmy, Kbin, & the Fediverse at large. 💕

Figured it was time to talk about recommendations on how to format your posts for maximum visibility & engagement and also let you know the different ways you can post to the community.

Sound good? Let's go!

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☝️ POST FORMAT RECOMMENDATION 🔊🎵

Key word here is "recommendation". I don't think we need strict rules to post, but here's what I recommend:

1. Band - Song or Album Title: At the very least, this should be included in your post title. Pretty standard way of identifying something. No worries about quotation marks, the text and the dash are more than enough. Obviously, if it's an article link, the article title would go here.

2. [Description Brackets]: Totally up to you, but personally I've been enjoying adding [Fresh] if the song or album is pretty new within the last week or two or so, or adding [Stream] if it's a link to an album stream link on Songwhip. I also sometimes use brackets to indicate the source if it's an article like [BrooklynVegan]. Not a rule, I just think it's nice to give some cred out.

3. Dates or small commentary after the title: Again, you do you. Year of release can be nice for older tracks & albums, or if you have a strong emotion about the album that you think needs to be in the title, go for it - though I think the caption section is probably best.

4. Album Art/Image or Link?: Lemmy is set up to share an image or a link as the primary content. Personally, I love album art or a cool image of the artist and would rather share the link to the music, video, or article in the caption. Lemmy's auto-thumbnails seem hit or miss, so to me it makes a richer post. But again, you do you!

Great! But let's say you aren't posting from Lemmy or Kbin?

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✌️ POSTING FROM MASTODON, FIREFISH, & OTHER FEDIVERSE MICROBLOGGING PLATFORMS 🔊🎶

While having a Lemmy/Kbin account is the best way to not miss any comments, you don't need to be on Lemmy to post here. By tagging "@alternativenation@lemmy.world" in a Mastodon, Firefish (Calckey), or other federated microblogging platform post, you also actually post to our community! How cool is that!

But the format of your post can get real janky if you don't follow a certain format. My recommendation is set up your Mastodon et al post in the following way:

1. Make the 1st line of the post the title like "Band - Song or Album Title" - no hashtags or account tags here, they get real messed up on Lemmy.

2. After the line break from the title, include your caption and any links. Feel free to add hashtags in the caption area (I know people follow hashtags on Mastodon et al)

3. Include "@AlternativeNation@lemmy.world" in the post (just not in the first line, please). This is how the post gets posted here!

4. Finally, I recommend adding an image to the post - this will be the thumbnail on Lemmy!

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🤟 HAPPY LISTENING! 🎧

That's it y'all! Hope this helps. Please spread the word to all your alternative music fans here, on Mastodon, and even on Reddit. Let's build something special together.

Cheers,

ren 🌈💕