I like the concept of fedigrow and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and similar communities to get more attention to new and small communities, but I was missing a way to promote german speaking communities.

That's why I started !communitypromo@feddit.org yesterday. A place for the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) to share and request communities that communicate primarily in german.

I tried multiple times to win over H.P.-communities to join Lemmy, until now with no success. Usually they either dont reply, threaten to ban me (Reddit) or say they dont have the time.

The latter happened to me just recently. They heard about the Fediverse, think its cool, but are already overwhelmed with keeping the site up.

What do you think here? Are you having similar experiences? Are you even doing it? Whould it be a good idea to propose a minimal solution like RSS-integration rather than full AP-support?

SOLUTION: literally write out [exclamation mark]community@instance. Do not use the autocomplete function. This works in both the sidebar and comments.

Using the URL markdown method (to have the display text be different from the dynamic link) impacts other UIs.

If you enter this:

You get this:

The links in the screenshot above will work in a graceful manner irrespective of what instance (or even what UI/platform?) you use.

Original Text

What are the best practises for adding links to other communities in your sidebar?

I mod the LW hardware community and all the links are tied to LW.

So https://programming.dev/c/linuxhardware

is linked via https://lemmy.world/c/linuxhardware@programming.dev

But that would mean anyone not on LW would get a logged out view of LW accessing the programming.dev/linuxhardware community. I don't have a programming.dev account so I added an LW-specific URL.

Is there some sort of markdown code that would "auto redirect" the user to a view based on their instance without any use of explicit URLs. For a second I thought that's what the exclamation mark does, but turns out it's just a shortcut for adding community URLs.

Why consolidate communities?

One of the advantages of a decentralized platform like Lemmy is the ability to create parallel communities on the same topic. "You don't like how a community is being moderated? Go to another instance and start a new community!" (with or without blackjack and hookers)

However, this is also a double-edged sword. The creation of multiple communities on the same (or similar) topics can also fragment the userbase, leading to very sparsely populated communities.

A few perspectives in favour of consolidation: (credits to @Ashyr@sh.itjust.works, @otter@lemmy.ca, and @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone)

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11171955

I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.

I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.

So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.

Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/8823953

I like this because people showing up to those communities might think that topic doesn’t have activity on Lemmy, when it actually does.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8370860

I sometimes think that unmoderated communities should be closed, and just be left and locked with a pointer to the active one. In case an issue arises with the active one, they can still be unlocked and used as back up.

Consolidating electric vehicle communities

Applying these principles to the EV communities on Lemmy, let's take an overview of what currently exists:

General-purpose:

• !electric_vehicles@lemmy.ml (active)
• !electricvehicles@lemmy.ml (active)
• !evs@lemmy.world (active)
• !electricvehicles@lemmy.world (inactive)
• !electriccars@lemmy.ca (inactive)
• !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net (active)
• !electricvehicles@lemm.ee (inactive)
• !electricvehicles@reddthat.com (inactive)
• !evs@notdigg.com (inactive)

Location-specific:

• !evs@feddit.uk (active) (UK-specific, European welcome)
• !evs_ireland@lemmy.ml (inactive) (Ireland-specific)
• !electricvehicles@midwest.social (inactive) (US-specific)

Other:

• !electricvehicles@gearhead.town (active)

Do all of these communities serve a distinct purpose? If not, could we consolidate some of them?

While Lemmy does not currently have a built-in way of moving or merging communities, @Blaze@lemmy.cafe has had some success with pinning an explanation post directing users to the new community and locking the old one. Is this something which could be applied to the EV communities on Lemmy?

The next question is, of course "Which communities should we consolidate to?"

Given the general sentiment to move off of ML (for ideological reasons) and off of World (to avoid centralization of instances), my proposal would be !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net. I think the SolarPunk instance is a nice match for an EV community, but I am interested to hear what others think.

Seems like there is an appetite from a few people from aussie.zone so that you guys can be kept up-to-date.

Pinging a few other people that are usually interested in this kind of stuff.

I've seen the idea of organically growing communities indirectly and directly mentioned in various threads when people discuss which communities they'd like to see on instances, and in a different way in response to community creation announcements. Despite this, and some inconsistent efforts on my own part, I've not seen too many others appear to be trying to put this in action.

I think any of the open-ended chat/conversation/general communities are a good place to start with this, but I've found it tricky to work out what to post to them. I suspect that may be somewhat similar for others, but being in the boat with'em, I'm not sure how to help.

Regardless, I think these communities make more sense for people to find those that share their interests to then start their own communities vs. starting communities before knowing if anyone else is interested.

What do you think, and what do you think would help people feel comfortable posting in these broader communities?

Realized it's been a while

Just wondering if anyone has ideas around best practices for cross posting articles?

I recently setup !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com and mainly only post to that community, with no cross posting.

My thinking was that it's probably best for subscribers/readers to crosspost to other communities, rather than me "spamming" the articles to other communities.

But I'm not sure it's the best way to go, since it's kind of hard to get traction with a new community initially.

Any thoughts on what is a good practice way to go about increasing visibility of the community a bit more, without annoying people? Or is it maybe best to stick to the current approach and let things happen organically?

Edit: I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to provide feedback on this post. I got a lot of useful info, and will incorporate your suggestions in future.

Hello everyone,

!showsandmovies@lemm.ee, the non-LW alternative to talk about TV shows, is quite successful (2.08K users / month)

It's still mostly me posting the content (by the way, thank you @realcaseyrollins@thelemmy.club, @reef@lemmy.ca and @BrikoX@lemmy.zip for posting too), so I'm creating this thread hoping that other people interested in the topic would come to post about their favorite shows there too!

For mods, we are currently two, so if you want to join feel free to comment on the relevant pinned thread. I created it 1 month ago and never had any comment, but who knows

I made a post in programming.dev/c/privacy, but it's not there on the programming.dev side

And I checked my profile https://programming.dev/u/lemmee_in@lemm.ee

And it shows this

What's going on here?

Gradually we've been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.

Entertainment

However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there's not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, !entertainment@lemm.ee, though that someone could try to pick up and make active.

This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also !popculturechat@sh.itjust.works though.

Music

In a similar vein, while there's a variety of music communities, there's only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community's expectations/preferences for posts are.

As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there's a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at !popheads@poptalk.scrubbles.tech for those interested.

Sports

Likewise with sports, there's a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it'd help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they'd like.

Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter...But unlike the first two, I can't find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.

Ideas on How and Where to Organize

In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?

I'm not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn't open for community creation.

In short: there's good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.

My current instance, diagonlemmy.social has no images, which is not great. So I'm thinking about creating an instance with a Harry Potter meme community.

What do you think?

Hello everyone,

If you look at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy?version=0.19.3, you see a few instances that host alternatives to LW communities

• !linux@programming.dev
• !android@lemdro.id
• !privacyguides@lemmy.one

Lemmy 0.19.5, has been released on 19 June, we are now three months later.

I've been reaching out to a few of them

• https://programming.dev/post/17587331, and further on the instance Matrix: no planned schedule for updates
• For Lemdro.id, I reached out to their Matrix a first time in August, then another time this week, they told me they have no real schedule for the update, but that it might be done in November
• for Lemmy.one, there is this thread I posted there in early June (https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/we-re-giving-lemmy-a-try-welcome-to-privacyguides-lemmy-one-x-post/12734/7). I have been since then in contact with one of their mods in June, I offered to have more mods for their community (suggesting @otter@lemmy.ca as they already mod !privacy@lemmy.ca ), but they have never answered.

Now, important disclaimer

I am personally very thankful for those admins to manage those instances. I have been posting to those communities a lot to try to better decentralization,, and it's very generous of them to give their time, energy and infrastructure to run those instances.

On the other hand, having such long times between updates releases and the instance actually updating concerns me a bit, because it seems to show that those instances are relying on one single admin which could disappear overnight, and might also have trouble with reacting in case of incident.

I guess the opposite view is that it doesn't matter so much, they'll update when they update, and they probably don't prioritize those updates as much compared to an actual incident (which we saw back in the days with the federation issues between LW and Australia / New Zealand servers).

For people curious about LW (still running 0.19.3 as well), they told me they wanted to skip 0.19.5 due to this one issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2629 which if fixed in 0.19.6. It makes sense due the high number of mods they sometimes have per community).

That's it for me, curious to hear what you all think.

Slightly surprised to find the Adulting, Career Guidance, and Jobs communities haven't gained too much traction, or in one case stalled out. Although these communities aren't the most exciting or uplifting, so it also makes sense.

I'm talking about the following on Lemmy World specifically:

• !adulting@lemmy.world
• !careerguidance@lemmy.world
• !jobs@lemmy.world

Given the second community never went anywhere, it's probably best to instead focus on Jobs if anyone was interested. Unfortunately in the case of both the Jobs and Adulting community, the moderators no longer seem to be active to coordinate with to help the communities along.

In looking about the only similar communities I could find to these were on other instances one might also consider too large or controversial, if not both (e.g. Lemmy ml and Lemmygrad). Given their lack of activity, if there was enough interest they might be rebuilt on other instances with more effort to get them going. However, seeing as that already seems to be something of an uphill struggle, revitalizing what's here might be preferable.

Thoughts?

I feel to maximize growth:

• Post daily at a time when most people are on Lemmy.
• Always try to include an interesting picture with the post. If you're sharing a URL, sometimes a thumbnail doesn't show or is uninteresting. In these cases, find a better picture and use that and move the URL to the body of the post.
• Shamelessly plug the community every chance you get. Speaking of which, !augmented_reality@lemmy.world

Following up on this post: https://feddit.org/post/2379333/1762691

An list of potential memes: https://feddit.org/post/2379333/1722394

A meme posted to !fediverselore@lemmy.ca : https://feddit.org/post/2421485

@Emperor@feddit.uk already expressed interest.

For me, there are a few pros and cons.

Pros:

• Memes are an easy way to convey a message
• Fediverse-specific content is always nice

Cons

• Memes communities tend to be very popular
• Due to the topic of the community, there might be some heated debates and discussions in the comments (the example above with the vegan cat food is a good example). That might be quite time-consuming to follow and moderate

Based on this, I think we would need probably at least 5 mods to make sure the community stays sufficiently moderated.

Are any of you interested?

Most frontends (I don't know any, really) doesn't allow you to set a default language for your post. For that reason, a lot of frontends allow you to post without any language selected, while defaulting to English. But that is not universally true. Photon recently started requiring language to be selected and started defaulting to Undetermined language. This now creates unnecessary friction when the community doesn't have it as allowed language and requires the user to select allowed language for every single post.

It really is a simple change on your end that will take you seconds, but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.

On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Ctrl key.

P.S. This community is a great example of one that doesn't allow Undetermined language.

Created this account so I could create the community. Decided on lemm.ee because my main account is on aussie.zone, which does not allow community creation (and limits its communities to things about Australia). Figured lemm.ee is better than lemmy.world due to the latter's performance/federation issues.

!aom@lemm.ee