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Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem
(popcar.bearblog.dev)
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Fedigrow
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86 users here now
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
If you aren't already the moderator of
n-1communities on a multitude of instances, there are some pretty significant challenges: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.
Same experience here
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:
That takes away the paralysis, at least for me.
What do you do when there are two similarly active communities?
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 try to avoid posting to .world if there's a viable alternative, personally, so I'd opt for lemdro.id consistantly. I do the same with the videos communities, where I've been trying to boost !videos@sopuli.xyz instead of posting to videos at .world.
But if it wasn't .world, the situation wouldn't be ideal, and I'd support combining the communities if the mods were down for it.
I've raised the issue to the LW mods a few months ago, they told me they were not interested in merging. The active mods being on the LW staff, it make sense.
That's unfortunate :(
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
Post on the one with the most recent post.