From what I know, articles are what we would think of as a reddit post. Naming conventions, and all. They are the things you read in magazines. Posts seem to go automatically under the microblogging section. So they're very much like a collection of tweets/blog posts aimed at a specific magazine.
Therefore if it's something important you want people to see, like a news article, something to fuel discussion, etc., I feel like doing it as an article would definitely be better. Doing it as a post is basically tweeting about it. Someone will probably see it, but most may miss it
I think it is helping me to read the "same" response from different sources. The repeated exposure as well as the nuances of each response aggregates into a better understanding. Hopefully I can pay it forward when I come across someone else asking it!
Ngl, I chuckled a bit when I saw who Spark tagged. Out of now 137,504 users on this instance, I think we've run into each other some 4-5 times. Which isn't a bad thing, mind. Makes everything feel more like a community instead of a faceless horde.
That second reply took me a while to even put into words, and it definitely is an unusual thing to try to wrap your head around if you're not already used to federation as a default thing. I'd personally never even heard the word before a few days ago, unless it was off Star Trek. So I'm still having to break myself of seeing this as "the one and only forum that is better than all other forums and functions only as a forum." No. We're multimillions of people all using the same exact chat service from entirely different platforms. By necessity, we're going to end up with things it doesn't entirely make sense for a text forum to have, because half of us aren't on a forum. There's even Peertube, for instance.
I know I'm repeating myself, I'm just marveling at it. It's so cool.
@Nepenthe Yeah it's a weird, throwback experience to recognize some usernames on here. I have to admit I never really registered any user on Reddit — I'm sure that's mostly on me and how I used it, of course.
I get that sense of marvel. I've been feeling unsatisfied with my online experience for a while and so far this jump into the fediverse feels like it's addressing what I felt was missing.
@Nepenthe I think on #kbin as it looks right now a microblog post could be easily missed if the magazine is very active but the thing is that when federation works they could also go on all the federated microblogging instances and on the home of the followers. This way they could get "points" from favs and boosts and be more visible here as well.
They could also be useful to comment realtime events, even though this will probably be a problem for the rest of the fediverse because here you don't need to put an hashtag and it's not easy for people to selectively mute them so they would probably mute the user.