How do crossposts work, and when is crossposting appropriate?

A crosspost is a feature that allows you to share an existing Reddit post to a second community while preserving a link back to the original. When you click the Share button beneath a post and select "Crosspost to community," Reddit creates a new post in the community you choose. The new post displays the original post's title, content, and author credit, with a visible link back to the source. Crucially, this means the original creator receives proper attribution automatically, and any upvotes on the crosspost are separate from upvotes on the original. Crossposting is appropriate when content clearly belongs in more than one community. A stunning photograph might belong in both a nature photography subreddit and a community focused on the specific location depicted. A news story about environmental policy might be relevant to both r/environment and a regional subreddit. A funny video about cooking might fit both r/funny and a cooking community. The crosspost mechanism was designed precisely for this multi-community relevance scenario. Some communities disable crossposts. When you attempt to crosspost to such a community, the option will be greyed out or an error message will appear. This is a deliberate moderator choice that should be respected. Trying to work around it by manually copying content and reposting it as an original submission is generally considered poor form and may violate community rules or Reddit's content policy if it involves content you did not create. Timing matters with crossposts. If the original post is very recent and still gaining traction, crossposting it quickly can help it reach the right audiences. If the original post is months old, crossposting it may be seen as digging up old content unnecessarily, which some communities frown upon. When in doubt, review whether other crossposts exist in the destination community to gauge how they are typically received.