Tip: make your text posts stand out by adding an image

Part of making communities discoverable is making the posts in those communities stand out. If you're an admin, moderator, or even if you're a contributor who wants to draw in subscribers and increase engagement, you should always try to attach an image to any text-only posts you make.

Overview

Important note: This post applies to Lemmy 0.18.0. In Lemmy 0.18.1, you will see separate text boxes for the URL and the image of a post.

When you create a post that has a URL, Lemmy will try to grab a picture from the URL's destination to insert into the post thumbnail. But when you create a text-only post, you need to supply that image yourself. Luckily, it's very easy to do.

How To

In the image below, we have a post I'm writing for Lemmy.ninja's Boomer Shooter community. It's about a patch for Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, a first-person boomer shooter game. As is often the case with announcements like this, there isn't a good web page for me to link to. Just an announcement on Twitter (ewww!) and a quick note in Steam. This is the perfect candidate for a text post with a picture!

Step One: Get a picture

Start by finding a good image to use for your post. You will need to download this image to your computer so that you can upload it to your post in a later step. For this example, I've selected an image from the news article about the patch. Another good source is an image generated by Stable Diffusion or another AI image generation system. AI-generated images are always different. Using them will give the posts in your community variety when viewed side-by-side.

Try to keep the image somewhat small. Let's say somewhere around 500 x 500 pixels or less. Larger images take longer to load, which can be especially noticeable on overloaded servers. They also take up a relatively large amount of space on the server.

Step Two: Write Your Post and Upload the image.

Once you have your image downloaded, it's time to write your post (if you haven't already) and to attach your image to the post. Attaching it is easy:

1. Click the little image icon beneath the URL field.

Note: There's another, identical icon on the Body section. Don't use this one; it's used to upload an image in the body of your text.

2. Select the image you want to upload.

When you click upload, the image will be uploaded to the server that the community is hosted on, and you will see the URL field is populated with a path to the image.

Note: You can also supply a URL to a remotely-hosted image in the URL field and get the same result. The bonus is that the image won't be taking up space on your community's Lemmy instance. This will make your administrators very happy.

And that's it! You can now submit your post and the post will contain a nice thumbnail. Users can click on the thumbnail and expand it if they want to see the image at full size.

Let's take a look at the final result!

This looks great! All of the posts in the community have a good variety of eye-catching images. On the All feed, this post will stand out among all the other posts from different communities, hopefully encouraging people to subscribe and participate. It's also a signal to others that the contributors care about the comment of their community!