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.
I think from the technical point of view, it should be possible for users to merge multiple communities into one. I think the git software could be a great template for achieving this. The admins of each community would only be responsible for their instance of the community. The same merging could apply to comments.
The big challenge however would be to automate this into a seemless experience for the user. If the goal is to attract more users, the user experience has to be on a tiktok level of simplicity.
An additional problem, where I don’t have an answer yet is: What is supposed to happen if two communities start in the same way, but develop into different directions?
Edit: Seeing the new comments: I like the social approach of admins coming together and collaborating in a single community even more. But it would still be nice, if a community could be hosted on multiple instances at once, for redundancy.