I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.
A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?
B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?
Someone’s already replied about Mastodon’s relation to Twitter, but I think the big part of why we can learn from Mastodon is because they’ve gone through all this in November ish.
They had the server difficulties, regular people getting confused at how federation works, struggling with the conflict of wanting to leave Twitter but Mastodon being relatively small compared to Twitter, people making accounts but then petering off in terms of usage (like me! Except I didn’t use Twitter much anyway).
Whilst the lessons from Mastodon won’t always be applicable to Lemmy, there’s a lot that can be learnt