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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Asklemmy
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Honestly I wish there were less communities. I've said this before, but people treat Lemmy like late-stage Reddit, expecting niche communities for everything, and we end up with hundreds of communities with no (or one, if we're lucky) active members.
This problem is then amplified by the fact that these niche communities are split even further across several instances, so our userbase ends up completely dissipated.
I would love to see users focus on a smaller number of more general-purpose communities. Of course, these should still be shared across instances, but I think we would benefit a lot from having, say, a "video games" community instead of 500 specific game communities.
As a side note as well, I don't think we shouldn't be "allowed" to create more niche communities (though if an instance admin wanted to regulate, that's their call). I think this should be more of a user culture shift, if anything.
When I moved to Lemmy from Reddit (about a year ago) and wanted to look for the equivalent of r/Ireland here, I was met with about 5 or 6 different communities (spread across various instances). You couldn’t really call any of them active, occasionally someone would post a link to a news article but there was no engagement.
Things have improved since then but I definitely agree with your point.
I disagree. There's no problem with hundreds of niche communities. They create the opportunity for a real community to form simply by people subscribing to them. And if nobody posts on them, they are still there, not hurting anyone. But if someone does post on them, then everyone who is subscribed to that muni can see that post. So the worst case scenario is basically neutral, and the best case scenario is people have some posts in their feed for their niche interest.
Further, unlike at the outset of reddit, people are now really familiar with how thankless and time-consuming being a moderator is.
I'm not eager to have to manage a bunch of communities. If there's a community that I wished existed, but I don't care deeply enough to want to manage it, I'm not going to go out of my way to create it, which leaves the community non-existent. So I think having some ready-made communities from people willing to take on moderation duties is a good thing. Fewer people are willing to make the jump to be a moderator these days, and for good reason.
I honestly don't think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.
Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you'd get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.
This is a good point. Reddit originally had no communities. Then there were maybe a dozen, all picked by the admins... and already /r/Atheism was one of them, because that's how the userbase went. People who don't understand why such a community was necessary do not remember living through 90s / 00s American culture.