Sharing and Discovery

Deep Dives are designed to be shared and discovered. Whether you want to inspire others, collaborate on research, or simply organize your personal collections, there are multiple ways to share your Deep Dives and help others find them. This guide covers all the sharing and discovery options available to you.

Public Deep Dives

When you set a Deep Dive to "Visible to All," it becomes a public collection that anyone can discover and explore:

• Main Feed Discovery: Public Deep Dives appear in the main Deep Dives feed, where anyone browsing can find them
• Search Visibility: Your public collections are searchable by title, description, and tags
• Profile Showcase: Public Deep Dives are prominently displayed on your profile for visitors to explore
• Forkable: Other users can fork your public Deep Dives to create their own versions (more on this below!)
• Community Building: Public collections help build community around shared interests and topics

Best for: Research projects you want to share, learning resources, curated collections that tell a story, or any Deep Dive where you want to inspire and help others discover great content.

Friends Only Visibility

The "Visible to Friends" option creates a semi-private collection that's perfect for sharing with your inner circle:

• Friend-Exclusive: Only users who are your friends can see and access these Deep Dives
• Personal Collections: Great for sharing personal reading lists, research notes, or collections you're still working on
• Collaborative Spaces: Perfect for sharing resources with a trusted group without making them fully public
• Privacy Control: Friends can view and interact with your collection, but it won't appear in public feeds or search results

Best for: Personal collections you want to share with close connections, work-in-progress research, or any Deep Dive where you want more privacy than public but more sharing than private.

Forking Deep Dives: The Nerdy Way to Collaborate

Here's where things get interesting. "Forking" is a term we borrowed from the world of open-source software development, and we're proud to lean into its nerdy origins.

In software development, "forking" a project means creating your own copy of someone else's code so you can modify it, experiment with it, or build something new based on their work. It's how open-source collaboration works, developers fork projects on platforms like GitHub, make their own changes, and sometimes contribute back to the original.

We've brought that same collaborative spirit to Deep Dives. When you fork someone's public Deep Dive, you're creating your own complete copy of their collection. You get all their items, their structure, their notes, everything. But here's the beautiful part: once it's forked, it's yours. You can add new items, remove ones that don't fit, reorder everything, add your own notes, and make it completely your own.

How Forking Works:

• Only Public Deep Dives Can Be Forked: You can only fork Deep Dives that are set to "Visible to All"
• Complete Copy: When you fork, you get all the items, notes, and structure from the original
• Attribution Maintained: The system keeps track of where your fork came from, maintaining the connection to the original creator
• Starts Private: Your forked Deep Dive starts as "Visible to Self" (private), so you can customize it before sharing if you want
• Make It Your Own: Once forked, you have full control—add items, remove items, reorder, edit notes, change the title, everything
• Independent Evolution: Your fork evolves independently from the original. Changes to the original won't affect your fork, and vice versa

Why Fork? Maybe you found an amazing reading list but want to add a few books of your own. Or you discovered a research collection that's close to what you need, but you want to take it in a different direction. Or perhaps you want to create a personalized version of someone's learning path. Forking lets you build on others' work while making it authentically yours.

Best for: Building on great collections you discover, creating personalized versions of learning resources, or starting your own research from someone else's foundation. It's collaboration, remixing, and building on each other's work, all wrapped up in one beautifully nerdy concept.

Tags for Discovery

Tags are your Deep Dive's passport to discovery. They help people find your collections through search and connect your work to broader topics and interests:

• Search Integration: Tags make your Deep Dives searchable. When someone searches for a topic, your tagged collections can appear in results
• Interest Connections: Tags connect to LavishMade's broader interest system, helping people discover your collections when browsing topics they care about
• Cross-Content Discovery: Tags help people find related content across blogs, posts, and other Deep Dives, creating connections between different types of content
• Community Building: Popular tags help build communities around shared interests and topics
• Multiple Tags: You can add multiple tags to a single Deep Dive, helping it be discovered through different search paths

Tagging Best Practices:

• Use specific, descriptive tags that accurately represent your collection's content
• Include both broad and narrow tags (e.g., both "photography" and "street photography")
• Consider what terms people might search for when looking for content like yours
• Use existing tags when possible to connect with existing communities
• Don't over-tag—3-5 relevant tags is usually better than 10+ tags

Direct Links

Every Deep Dive has a unique URL that you can share directly with anyone:

• Share Anywhere: Copy the URL from your browser's address bar and share it via email, messaging, social media, or anywhere else
• Privacy Respected: Direct links respect your visibility settings. If your Deep Dive is private, only you can access it. If it's friends-only, only your friends can access it
• No Account Required: For public Deep Dives, people can view them via direct link even without a LavishMade account
• Perfect for Specific Sharing: Great for sharing a specific collection with a specific person or group
• Bookmark-Friendly: Others can bookmark your Deep Dive for easy access later

Best for: Sharing specific collections with colleagues, sending learning resources to students, or directing people to a particular Deep Dive you've created.

Best Practices for Sharing and Discovery

To maximize how your Deep Dives are discovered and shared:

• Choose the Right Visibility: Make Deep Dives public when you want them discovered, friends-only for personal sharing, and private for your own organization
• Write Clear Titles and Descriptions: Help people understand what your collection is about at a glance
• Use Relevant Tags: Tag thoughtfully to help people find your collections through search
• Add Context with Notes: Rich notes on items help others understand why you included them and what makes them valuable
• Organize Thoughtfully: A well-organized Deep Dive is more engaging and shareable
• Update Regularly: Active collections that are updated frequently tend to be more discoverable
• Share Directly When Appropriate: Don't hesitate to share direct links when you want to point someone to a specific collection

Balancing Privacy and Discovery

You have complete control over who can see your Deep Dives:

• Public (Visible to All): Maximum discoverability, forkable, appears in feeds and search
• Friends Only (Visible to Friends): Shared with your network, not in public feeds, perfect for personal collections
• Private (Visible to Self): Only you can see it, perfect for personal research and organization

You can change the visibility of any Deep Dive at any time. Start private while you're building it, then make it public when you're ready to share. Or make something public to inspire others, then switch it to friends-only if you want more privacy later.