Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
History of LW controversial decisions
- when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
- when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
- when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
- when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from [email protected] , it’s still in [email protected] )
- when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
- when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )
Might it not be more beneficial for related communities to, in the way of the old web, highlight each other in pinned/featured posts and sidebars? The idea being that there’s still some benefit to different moderation styles and community cultures/vibes.
Maybe also encouraging community moderators to communicate with each other more to figure out how they want their communities to be, how they might want to differ to create more distinct identities?
I think this is an excellent idea, and I have tried to do this with subs like [email protected]. It would be great if this became standard practice, or a sort of reciprocal courtesy between communities.
Any ideas for how to encourage mod communication?
I would just DM the other mods. Worked quite well for me