Hello everyone,
Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.
As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.
One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to
- people having to subscribe to both to see the content
- posters having to crosspost to both
- comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.
I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.
We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.
The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.
What do you think?
Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.
With all the defederation going on nowadays I'm happy that there are many different servers hosting the same content, otherwise people couldn't participate in the discourse once the one and only server which hosts the community defederates from their server.
But that's the issue, it's not because there is another version of the community that exists on a different server that people will rediscuss there what they already talked about on the main community, especially with the current low number of users.
You see beehaw users complaining about not having access to !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works , because while there is !patientgamers@lemmy.world , it has two posts that are 2 months old
But then the OPs solution of closing !patientgamers@lemmy.world and only allowing !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works still doesn't help the people on beehaw. What those users can do are 2 things:
Indeed, but that's when we hit one of the limitations of the current Lemmy population.
Solution 1 cannot really happen as there isn't enough user to maintain a patient gamers population on a second community next to the main one. To be honest, the main one should probably need a few more posters too.
This is what the whole post is about: the current Lemmy population cannot sustain being spread so thin over so many different communities. We should consolidate a few ones.
Due to the features of the Fediverse, once (and I say once and not if, because I still hope one day it will be the case) we reach a large enough userbase, then users will be free to open their own communities, in a similar way we now have !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id