Blog
announcement add tag
Jack Douglas
**tl;dr:** you can now see posts from other communities on each community home page — if you want to.

### **What are cross-community feeds?**

Cross community feeds are a new setting in your profile for each community:

![in profile](/image?hash=a70f50a0df8c31d7ff3ecd67fdfc5b163443505d374aaba5a302fcb73673f4a2)

Once activated, you see posts from each selected community, along with the actual community you are in, on the community home page. Below you can see the posts from powershell.ta and csharp.ta in among the local dotnet.ta posts. The 'foreign' posts include the icon of the source community as an indication that they are from elsewhere:

![on home page](/image?hash=619cc4da06c2eee2d3e97bf6659386e40ec18e6e680e8a7e498e290dd269b8c4)

Foreign posts also get the colour theme from the source community, though it isn't so obvious for C# because the theme is similar to .net.

### **Why would I want to opt-in?**

Several possible reasons:

1. if the sites are related:

   * C# and PowerShell are both part of the .net umbrella and we think it would be usually desirable to see the .net posts on the C# and PowerShell home pages and vice versa

   * Marathi TeX is a sister community to the English TeX site and will be importing/translating Q&A from there as well as creating independent content

2. you have a 'normal' home page and want to see posts from certain other communities without switching to them (I have this set up so I see them all on Meta)

### **Why are some opt-out rather than opt-in?**

A small number of cross-community feeds seem like they should be on by default, like .net/C#/PowerShell for example.

Please note that:

* the feeds are only created when you participate in a community for the first time — if you have already participated you need to opt-in manually
* you can opt-out on your profile and if you do so you stay opted-out until you decide otherwise

### **Stack Overflow [trialled](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/396370/technical-site-integration-observational-experiment-live-on-stack-overflow) something like this recently, and it has been poorly received, is it really a good idea?**

You tell us! If it doesn't work out we'll remove it, or make it 100% opt-in. However the Stack Overflow trial was a bit different:

* it was opt-out by default
* it wasn't configurable
* they look like they are trying to move towards an amalgamation of their sites in the long term — SO and Teams make money, and nothing else does. The other SE sites cost money to run and maintain. In other words their primary motive doesn't seem to be adding a feature that users actually want

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