I love the original patientgamers subreddit so I was stoked to find this community. And because lemmy seems to have a more knowledgeable crowd any topic I posted here had great engagement and discussions, despite the small community. I am too busy to be a mod but maybe I can help by sparking this discussion: what would be needed to keep this sub going?
Agreed, and also why I think Lemmy will never progress past a niche audience despite being capable of doing so. It’d be nice if there was a feature that allowed instances to merge all like-named communities into a singular one. I know cross posting was meant to help address the problem, but that’s a manual process that falls quite short in resolving the core issue.
I don’t think it’s that fundamental. I mean, Reddit has one shared namespace for subreddit names, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to use one keyword. Like, you have /r/guns and /r/firearms, stuff like that. Nothing merges those.
And even for /r/patientgamers, there’s overlap. Like, /r/patientgamers probably has a fair bit of overlap with /r/retrogaming (note: [email protected] and [email protected] exist) and /r/truegaming.
I do think that making lemmyverse.net’s search feature or something similar that spans multiple instances to help people find communities across many instances more easily would help, and putting support for that in clients. The Threadiverse model of having an instance not index communities until someone on an instance subscribes helps scalability, but if the main way to search for communities only searches communities that an instance knows about, it kind of kills discoverability for users.
In regard to Reddit having the same problem, I agree it does to an extent. But like you said, it only allows for synonyms or alternate wording for the same topic in a subreddit’s name. On Lemmy, since instances are different, the fractured communities can be named the exact same thing. Most casual users are not going to realize this and think that the one community they’re in is not active when on another instance, the other like-named community might have grown and is now quite active since they initially setup their subscriptions. They’ll never know unless they happen to run another search and see the alternate community’s user count.
Maybe I’m wrong and it isn’t a big deal. But I do agree that searching and indexing would be a great step in helping discoverability.
There’s some site that’s designed just to use a bot account on various major instances to subscribe a new community. It waits until there are something like 10 regular users subscribed, then unsubscribes. You could just plonk in a community name and have it do so. That helps discoverability but kind of clashes with the whole intended scalability decision in lemmy/kbin/etc design not to slurp in content from all communities out there.
I think this is the github project page, but someone was running an instance of it.
googles
Man, I can’t even find the instance that someone was running, which does kind of maybe highlight the need for a central “Threadiverse wiki” that links to all this stuff. fediverse.observer, lemmyverse.net, fedidb.org, join-lemmy.org, etc. There’s some other tool that someone made to measure post federation latency, so you could see what instances are overloaded or not working. There are a ton of useful tools out there, but no central hub. I keep finding them when someone links to them on the Threadiverse and then never being able to find them again.
My own home instance, lemmy.today, has always had a request in the sidebar asking people to subscribe to a bunch of communities so that they become visible to the instance, which seems like kind of an awkward workaround for discoverability:
Do you mean this?
Yes, I think that’s it, thanks!
Who would decide how it’s run? Different communities with the same name may have different rules or content in mind.