Small communities that are similar should think about mushing together for activity. Example: Hiking, Backpacking, Thru Hiking. It will generate more Activity and then branch out. We have too many niche pages that won’t be active.

  • Scrubbles
    54•1 year ago

    Agree, in the great reddit migration everyone came over and just created communities for everything. Now that the dust has settled we have hundreds of one person communities and so many similar ones.

    Personally I’d like to see the admins go through their communities and say if there is only one member or if the only mods have been dormant to lock the communities and pin a post saying the community is up for adoption. At the very least that’d stop some of the hemorrhaging

    • @Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
      15•1 year ago

      I guess it’s more on the mods of a community to look out for similar communities and engage with potential other moderators.

      I just had a discussion with @livus@kbin.social about !moviesandtv@lemm.ee. I guess other mods should probably do the same.

      Admin are already busy enough, especially wit 0.19 around the corner.

      Also, good to see you around!

      • Scrubbles
        2•1 year ago

        Yeah, I know there’s just no way for users to do it. If there’s only one mod and they’re dormant then there’s not a lot of options, and there are people who probably would want to take over the communities. There should be a “vote of no confidence” option, but obviously that could be abused. That’s why just scanning and seeing which ones are dead first might be nice.

        • livus
          4•1 year ago

          @scrubbles Kbin now has an automated process so if a community owner has been absent for a month, another person can just take over, and either revive it or delete it. Abandoned communities are also listed as abandoned. Would be really good if Lemmy could have something similar!

          !movies@kbin.social started great and has over 4,000 subscribers, but suffered from an absent mod for a long time. Recently I made myself its owner and am slowly bringing it back to life.

          That’s why I was a little bemused at first when @Blaze (who I somehow mistook for a bot!) started crossposting all our new posts, but I actually don’t think it’s a problem. Interestingly, I’ve checked the list of upvoters for those crossposted articles across the two communities and it’s not the same people in each. And only 21 people from my instance subscribe to moviesandtv.

          I think it’s good for mods to have these conversations. As the fediverse develops and discovery gets better (e.g. publicly shareable multi-feeds) things will start to grow or disappear organically and different communities will have different rules and flavours.

          To take the example of movies again, already !movies@lemmy.world has a somewhat different flavour than !moviesandtv@lemm.ee which includes television.

          Fragmentation can be cleaned up, but I also think decentralization is one of the important strengths of the fediverse, and we should be patient with small communities.

          • Brome
            1•1 year ago

            @livus@kbin.social Thanks for the info, I didn’t know that!

            I must admit I’ve neglected my longboard and moviesFr Kbin communities. I’m glad to learn that this automated process exists. Not only is it a good idea to ensure that magazines can survive and be maintained, but it also makes me want to get back to them and take care to them, because I don’t necessarily want someone else to take over. 😄

            @scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech @Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de

            • livus
              2•1 year ago

              @brome hey, I remember seeing moviesFr! :)

              Yeah Ernest keeps low key adding features. You should probably check out “collections” next time you log in - it’s like multireddits but for the fediverse.

              • Brome
                1•1 year ago

                @livus@kbin.social Thanks for noticing! 😉

                Yes I’m going to catch up with all the changes that happened. It’s cool to hear that Ernest is still here. One of the last things I remember hearing from here when I was active on kbin was that he was considering stepping out of the project and giving the keys to someone else.

                • livus
                  2•1 year ago

                  @brome he did mention that in the early days because he seemed worried he wasn’t going fast enough, but I think we all talked him out of it. :)

                  He did take some time out to deal with personal life, a couple of people made a fork (mbin). But the changes we’re seeing these days made it worth the wait!

                • Brome
                  1•1 year ago

                  @livus@kbin.social To be honest, the thing that made me give up on kbin, a few months ago, was the federation problem between kbin and other services.

                  The thing is, I have a lot more followers on Firefish than on kbin, and I’d like to be able to boost kbin content with my Firefish account to make it discoverable for people who follow me. But boosting is impossible for “link” type posts, which make up a large portion of the content posted on kbin.

                  Also, even though I was able to boost “thread” type posts, they didn’t look great on Firefish or Mastodon. Especially on Mastodon where they were reduced to a simple link pointing to the original kbin post, which is not very engaging.

                  I’m really looking forward to seeing these issues fixed. I think the threadiverse and the micro-blogging communities could benefit a lot from being able to correctly communicate with eachother.

    • @PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
      14•1 year ago

      Honestly, a pinned post linking to the “big” community would go a long way. Basically just “this community is abandoned. Go try [active community] instead.” But that would require the mods of those smaller communities to actually cede mod power to the larger ones. And if you know anything about online mods, you know that’ll never happen.

      • Scrubbles
        3•1 year ago

        Yeah, which is why I think it needs to be an admin thing. It’s posted automatically, but hey the mod can always remove it and keep the community going. But from what I see… 90% of them haven’t logged in in months and probably wouldn’t even notice. They log in again and want to pick it up again? Just remove the pinned post

      • livus
        2•1 year ago

        @PM_Your_Nudes_Please or they could just simply delete the communities.

        But abandoned communities tend to have absent mods. That’s why the Lemmy devs need to introduce a mechanism for adopting them, like we have at Kbin.

  • @grue@lemmy.world
    19•1 year ago

    We not only desperately need “multilemmys,” the implementation needs to go further than R*ddit did by making them public and maybe even by automatically creating ones for communities in different instances with the same name by default (but allowing mods to opt out).

  • @echo64@lemmy.world
    16•1 year ago

    I know you mean well op, but you are asking for people to make /another/ dead community. the communities didn’t work out. most won’t. it’s okay, that’s true on reddit too. essentially:

    eventually, if there is a community big enough to survive, it’ll find a home just fine.

  • likelyaduck
    15•1 year ago

    I see your point, and I agree that it would be nicer to just have to follow one community instead of a million smaller ones. There’s always cross-posting. When you make a post and there are several communities for the same thing, post on the smallest one and then cross post it on the other ones.

    Each community has a reason to exist, maybe different rules and different moderators. It’s up to them to arrange a merge or the admins to archive inactive communities.

    • @li10@feddit.uk
      5•1 year ago

      I’ve seen posters get loads of shit for sharing stuff on every community though.

      People always get angry about it in the comments and complain about being spammed.

      • @thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
        3•1 year ago

        In fairness I think that’s because people make multiple posts rather than just using the crosspost feature. But some mobile apps don’t have crosspost yet, so here we are.

      • livus
        1•1 year ago

        @li10 really? I’ve not seen that yet.

        If my feed gets clogged I just block the oversharers. They tend to be the types who won’t engage in the comments anyway.

    • @tacosanonymous@lemm.ee
      4•1 year ago

      Yeah, the different rules and base community are going to be a deal breaker for a lot of people.

      But open communication, cross-posting (manual or automated) can sort out these situations.

    • livus
      1•1 year ago

      @likelyaduck

      Each community has a reason to exist, maybe different rules and different moderators.

      This. No one is making anyone follow small communities. You can see by their stats what they are going to be like.

  • @Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
    7•1 year ago

    Video games are another big one.

    I always favor !games@sh.itjust.works rather than !games@lemmy.world, but I know some people think the opposite.

    At the moment, it’s mostly a debate between people wanting to centralize content on LW, and people who prefer it on another well-known instance.

    I’m guilty of that with !moviesandtv@lemm.ee and !movies@lemmy.world.

    But to be fair, games and movies and general interest, all the communities seem to be doing well, even if split.

    • Clay_pidgin
      3•1 year ago

      As much as I hate the bot content on principle, communities that either repost reddit or scrape some other aggregator at least have enough content for a community to begin to form around it. There just aren’t enough posters anywhere.

    • Sabata11792
      1•1 year ago

      I’m just trying to find some subs for my favorite games that have more than 2 post from 2 months ago.

  • @Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
    5•1 year ago

    I had a quick look at the 3 you quoted, and they all seem equally dead, with all the mods either missing or even banned.

    If you are interested in reviving it, feel free to select one, request its moderation to the admins of that instance, then post on all of the others to let people know that you are reviving the other.

    !cooking@lemmy.world had a similar discussion a few weeks back when they noticed they were spread too thin, with !recipes@lemmy.world for instance. You can see now that !recipe is locked, and has a pinned post to redirect to !cooking

  • @FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
    4•1 year ago

    Agreed; that does seem like an issue right now. For example, I like watches. And while there is - A - watches community, there’s also niches for expensive, affordable, mechanical, vintage, etc. We’re really not at the level of content where it makes sense to fragment it that much. I’d rather see all those posts rolled into one community until you reach enough of them to justify the split.

    I’ll be doing my part to generate some content, but it’ll take a concerted effort to grow things.