this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

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[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

There are only so many of us posting here.

The day we get 10 different people posting about quite popular topics like movies, then sure. But having the current split while there are 5 people posting for the entire platform seems counterproductive.

Another example I have is !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !privacy@programming.dev. Both communities have similar rules, instances are similar, everything is similar.

There is one poster there that seems to prefer the programming.dev one, so I have to crosspost everything they post to the dbzer0 one so that people subbed to that one don't miiss anything.

!movies@lemmy.world is a bit similar. It's mostly a one-person show (rough estimation, 80% of the posts are one person), but they wouldn't move to !movies@lemm.ee, while we have discussion posts, active mods, everything.

So sure, it's not that hard, but it doesn't mean that people will do it.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I think I just see the problem as a little different than "how can we make things easy for people." A lot of modern web design is "make it as easy as possible," but I don't think that actually always leads to the best experience. I really liked the take that the video I posted has on it.

If I had to describe the underlying problems with Lemmy, they would include things like "How do we stop anonymous accounts from being obnoxious" or "How can we put more of the control of people's experience in their own hands, instead of having moderators being able to 'override' a consenting communication between two people who want to have it." Both of those, I feel like, may actually involve making things harder for the average user to come onboard and figure out what's going on, or navigate the system effectively. But then if they're able to overcome that (honestly, pretty modest) obstacle, the end result is better. In my view that is ok. There's other stuff than just making it easy.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 7 hours ago

That's another improvement area indeed, but not thar related to choice paralysis linked to parallel similar communities existing

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don't need to find dead remote communities in their search results. If there are multiple active communities, that's not an issue, and there's no real reason to homogenize them behind lizard brain FOMO. If there's one active community and 6 dead ones, there's no reason for users to find any of the dead ones.

Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream "I want centralization".

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here.

This I absolutely would agree with. An option to hide communities that haven't gotten at least X amount of activity recently, so you can find them if you want to, but there's some kind of indication whether it's programming@super.active.place or programming@crickets x5 that you want to access, sounds great.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 7 hours ago

https://lemmy.world/c/moviesandtv@lemmy.film still gets posted to while the instance has been gone for around 2 years

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 18 hours ago

Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream “I want centralization

No, it's just consolidation of activity to a sustainable level.

Consolidation happened in the past

Those communities have no active counterpart, are they a threat to decentralization?

Forcibly merging communities that exist on completely different websites just because they run the same, or even just similar, software continues to scream "I want centralization".

The "merging" in Proposal 3 would be mutually opt-in by community moderators, not forced.

It sounds like community pruning is the better solution here. Users don't need to find dead remote communities in their search results.

Who gets to determine if a community is dead or not? That seems like a form of centralization.