Is it worthwhile to try to get mods to combine them? It just seems like a bit of a waste when trying to grow a community and its split in two.
Or is this what the fediverse is supposed to look like?
I read before somebody said that we might be able to combine similar communities at some point but don’t know if that’s true.
I think that at the moment many communities are too fragmented. A lot of them seem to be a single person. There is a sweet spot regarding size, and that number is different from community to community. I wish people would avoid making duplicates if they didn’t have at least one other person ready to join them though.
Yes, it’s a great thing.
In the old days of forums there were multiple forums for popular topics, so if you didn’t like one or didn’t agree with how it was moderated you had many more to choose from. It was usually friendly and you got to know all the regulars in a forum.
Next we had centralisation which lead to massive forums, resentment built up against moderators, everyone was faceless and had no sense of community, and it all basically turned in to a competition for attention.
Now we have decentralisation, we can have lots of manageable size communities again - it’s great.
@Mane25 Yeah, but it’s the pits for the smaller communities I used to use reddit for. The local-ish one had at most 300 people online at a time and most of them were lurkers. Split that into smaller groups and there isn’t enough critical mass in any one smaller group to make the communities work.
It wasn’t a problem for forums, for smaller interests there’ll be fewer forums, it’ll sort itself out.
I think that at the moment many communities are too fragmented. A lot of them seem to be a single person. There is a sweet spot regarding size, and that number is different from community to community. I wish people would avoid making duplicates if they didn’t have at least one other person ready to join them though.
That’s exactly what happened with reddit, I think it’s better to have more than one, worst case scenario you only sub to one and if it goes down there’s a quick alternative.
Personally I sub to both and if an article repeats no big deal I just move on
I’ve found that similar communities on different instances can have VERY different experiences in terms of the community and attitude. I know I’m generalizing, but I feel a lot of Lemmy.world instances are more negative and hostile than similar instances on beehaw.org. Personally, I’d rather they stay separate. That way I can be more precise on dialing in the experience I want.
As long as there is a way to spin up a new community if the mods go rogue, I’m okay with it.
I think that’ll always be the case with the Fediverse.
We need a feature to combine several communities into a group that we can follow in our subscriptions.
Then it wouldn’t matter anyway.
