I still have no idea how Lemmy really works, and I had to sign up for this instance - I don’t know, I don’t see a platform growing on that. But maybe that’s the point. I’m trying to engage though! The Voyager app’s “import sub” feature from Reddit is brilliant.
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
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to organize overall fediverse growth
- !reddit@lemmy.world to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
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Duplicates are a minor issue. That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).
The problems with #3 are:
- Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
- Different comms have different rules, and in this situation rule enforcement becomes a mess.
There's no good solution for that. On the other hand, the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links:
- a new user might not know which comms to follow, but they can simply copy a multi-comm from someone who does
- good multi-comms are organically shared by users back and forth
Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it's that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover. Also note that the root issue is not exclusive to federated platforms, it pops up in Reddit too; it's a consequence of users being able to create comms by themselves.
About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking [!pancakes@a.com](/c/pancakes@a.com) with a pinned thread like "go to [!pancakes@b.com](/c/pancakes@b.com)".
This is a minor part of the text, but I feel in the mood to address it:
I post once to gauge interest then never post again because I got choice paralysis
The same users who get "choice paralysis" from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who: can't be arsed to check rules before posting, can't be arsed to understand what someone else said before screeching, comment idiotic single-liners that add nothing but noise, whine "wah, TL;DR!" at anything with 100+ chars... because all those things backtrack to the same mindset: "thinking is too hard lol. I'm entitled to speak my empty mind, without thinking if I'm contributing or not lmao."
Is this really the sort of new user that we old users want to welcome here? Growth is important, but unrestricted growth regardless of cost is cancer.
Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
Maybe I am not fully understanding your point here but from my point of view this is just not true?
A lot of the traffic is going to be on very general topics like "memes" or "technology" where posts are going to fit pretty much every other similar community.
Plus, in this case whoever has the authorities to follow communities can decide if the posts fit, so you're not losing anything if posts from a more specific community like "wholesome memes" end up showing up in a more general "memes" community.
That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).
the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links
Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it’s that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover.
I respectfully disagree. In two minutes, I can easily find all the communities on a given topic and subscribe to them all. The problem is not discovery. The problem is fragmentation of the user base, as explained by popcar in their blog post:
Alright, time to post. But where?
pancakes@a.comandpancakes@c.comare both somewhat active... Should I post inaand crosspost toc? Maybe there's hope in other communities kicking off again, should I crosspost tobanddas well? Oh no, am I going to post 4 times just to find my fellow pancake lovers?!
Let me take this a bit further: After crossposting to all 4 pancake communities, I get three comments. One in
a,b, andd. Each comment is in a separate post and none of them interact with each other unless the poster opens each crosspost separately.
I do not see how Proposal 2 (multi-communities) solves the issue of fragmentation of the user base, while Proposal 3 (communities following each other) solves this quite elegantly.
About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking
[!pancakes@a.com](/c/pancakes@a.com)with a pinned thread like "go to[!pancakes@b.com](/c/pancakes@b.com)".
If you aren't already the moderator of n-1 communities on a multitude of instances, there are some pretty significant challenges:
- Find all the communities on a given topic (easy)
- Convince people that consolidation is a good idea (difficult)
- Get people, many of whom are reluctant to see a community on their home instance locked, to decide on a which community to switch to (sometimes impossible)
- Contact the moderators (or the admins, if the mods are inactive) of each of the
n-1communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (tedious)
It's a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I've had many more failures than I've had successes.
It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.
Same experience here
The same users who get “choice paralysis” from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who
I'm not so sure. I sometimes have choice paralysis again on a topic I'm not familiar with, and I'm sure quite a lot of other people do as well
I'm sure plenty exceptions exist - that's why I said "typically", it's that sort of generalisation that applies less to real individuals and more to an abstract "typical user".
@threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works , which is quite active as well, has a similar experience: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39248886/17090166
To me, choice paralysis happens to most of people, whatever their familiarity level with the platform. I would actually be worried if someone knew exactly where to post for any topic, because it would mean they probably just default to their home instance
I've personally developed my system as:
- If there are multiple communities, which is the most popular?
- If the most popular community is on a problematic instance, skip to the next most popular that is also on a good instance.
That takes away the paralysis, at least for me.
What do you do when there are two similarly active communities?
Post on the one with the most recent post.
Hm, I can't recall encountering that yet, but I can see how that would be a harder one to decide. I suppose I might cycle between them.
!android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id comes to mind
I think it's fair to choose the smaller instance then, in the interest of diversification.
Indeed, but as long as other people still prefer the LW version both communities will continue to splinter the conversations
Never thought about communities following communities. It actually makes a lot of sense and would solve the fragmentation issue in an elegant and "democratic" way.
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Multicommunities are/grouping communities is being discussed in this issue atm:
Fully agree with solution three, federated communities is the way. Solution two is just dumb and is basically just the subbed feed
i literally just want it to work like it does on matrix: a room (community in this instance) is an independent thing that exists on all servers with users participating in it, and then each server can also assign aliases to the rooms (communities) like how we assign domain names to IP addresses, of which the room (community) admins can set one to be the main alias which is generally displayed in UIs.
so a community called "bagels stacked on dogs" could have aliases like #bagelsondogs:lemmy.chat, #bageldogs:lemmy.chat, #bagelsondogs:discuss.dogchat.com, #bagelson:dogs.net, etc etc and the community admins would of course want to set #bagelson:dogs.net to be the main way to reference the community.
I still think multi-communities would be a good feature, even if not for this particular problem. (For example, to a have a dedicated "music" feed that includes several communities for different music styles you are interested in.)
But if you sub to all of them then there is zero need for such a feed. It adds extra work of making the feed and having to select the feed. There is barely enough content for viewing subscribed my new, why split a post or two a day into a separate feed?
IDK, man. It's not that hard to just check a few of the communities and see which ones are active, and then post to those ones. And the benefit you get, for asking people to take literally a couple of minutes of effort to sort out how to get involved with some particular topic, is pretty significant.
I'm not trying to say not to make good solutions to it, but also, trying to make everything maximally easy carries a significant down side, in that it attracts people who want to put minimal effort into everything (including their posts and their interactions with others once they've arrived on the network.)
I'd say it also turns off people who have expertise in other areas and would chime if there wasn’t so many hurdles.
Say an astrophysicist wants to connect with the community. Do you think they want to take time out of their day to learn the intricacies of a tool that otherwise has no use to them? Do you think they should have to?
This will inevitably keep this community gated from having a diverse userbase that Reddit has had at its peak.
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.
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.
That's another improvement area indeed, but not thar related to choice paralysis linked to parallel similar communities existing
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