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?
Yeah. There used to be a hundred thousand Dragonball forums out there, and it was never a problem. We should be ok with it not being a problem again.
The fomo over he idea that someone said sornthing somewhere about a thing I care about and I might not be seeing it is one of the worst things big social has given us.
My concern is that there’s a sort of critical mass necessary for something to be an active community. As an example, let’s arbitrarily say that critical mass is a minimum of 10 active users and there are 100 people interested in that topic on a platform, which means there up to 10 communities could be sustained.
In practice, there would probably only be 2-5 communities, with at least some overlap between them. If a subsection of one of the larger ones wanted to split off and make a new place to fill some unmet niche, they’d need at least 10 active users or the community would fizzle out and die.
However, if there were 20 equally sized communities for these 100 people, they’d be too small to gain traction. There’d be little overlap because each would be too small to really make a mark. It’s hard to grow when you’ve got very little content or activity. Lemmy’s sudden growth combined with confusion over how federation works means I’ve seen a few topics where there are multiple versions of that community, but all of them are small and quite inactive. I worry that instead of the people in those communities finding each other and either aggregating in one place, or finding ways to link up their separate communities, that all of them will fizzle out and die.