Right now on Lemmy we have a bunch of dad-based communities with varying levels of discussion. From the ones I can find, we have:
!dadworld@lemmy.world - last few posts were about a month ago. Mod was last active 10 months ago.
!daddit@kbin.social - last couple posts were about 2 months ago. The post before that was about 5 months ago. Not sure about mod activity.
!dads@feddit.uk - last post was yesterday, with some other posts in past few weeks. Mod was last active 6 months ago.
!dadsonly@lemmy.world - last post was a few weeks ago, with a couple months in between posts after that. Mod was last active 10 months ago.
!dadsplain@lemmy.ca - last couple posts were a week ago. With about a month or so between posts after that. Both mods were last active a year ago.
!dadvice@lemmy.world - last post was 3 months ago. Mod was last active 2 months ago.
!fatherverse@midwest.social - last post was about a month ago, and the one before that was about 4 months ago. Mod was last active today.
To help facilitate discussion, what do you all think about consolidating the dad-based discussion to one of those groups (preferably a somewhat moderated one, which just seems to be fatherverse…) for now?
Having the community on an instance other than lemmy.world and lemmy.ml is decentralizing.
The other parameter is that with 50k monthly active users, there is only so much activity on a specific topic.
Having it spread over 7 communities kills activity rather than keeping 1 community alive.
Having three dad communities on lemmy.world is weird and needs sorting out but one of the advantages of subject-specific instances is that they can give a different spin to a topic.
On English-speaking social media, it all tends to become very US-centric - the UK (and, presumably, Canadian, and, hypothetically, an Australian one) allows for people to have more local discussion as the logistics (schools, benefits, the legal system, etc) can be very different.
By the same token, I wouldn’t want all the other dad communities merged into the feddit.uk one (which is the most active, despite the Mod being AWOL, which is easily fixed) as it isn’t just a general dad’s discussion, although all dad’s are welcome, of course.
I see where you come from.
That’s why I try to keep both !yurop@lemm.ee and !casualconversation@lemm.ee active, while they have more or less the same topics.
Some communities are made to be “Internet inclusive”, some other are more “location grounded”
I guess sometimes the Lemmy population is not large enough to have “location grounded” communities, so it might be better to merge into the “all inclusive” one
Last point: as a non-native European, I never really paid attention to the English-speaking social media being very US-centric, hopefully that’s a bias we can correct here on Lemmy.
Lemmy.world is the biggest instance and managed by a team located (at least partially) in the Netherlands, so that’s a nice change compared to Reddit
I’m working on it. And there are Canadian and Australian instances doing their bit too.
I know, and that’s great! Lemm.ee, feddit.de, feddit.dk, feddit.it and all the others are great!
But on that topic, that still brings us to the question of “should an instance with a country TLD be limited to content of that country?”
Someone on Lemmy.ca brought that point up a few days back:
https://lemmy.ca/post/22625492/9613729
So that comes back to the point I mentioned above. When I created !yurop@lemm.ee on lemm.ee, it was obvious that it wasn’t going to be limited to Estonians.
However, when a community is created on feddit.uk, it can be centered on a local approach to a thematic (such as !nature@feddit.uk ). Which is great, but as I said, we are probably still very early in the stage of having different dad communities on Lemmy, so having mainly one (whatever instance it is on) might be more effective for activity
Encourage cross posting. The function is viable, and when it’s used, it not only improves each community individually, it keeps awareness of other options.
The only thing “killing activity” is people nodding being unaware of cross posting existing and/or using it.
Crossposts don’t aggregate comments. If you ask “How was your father’s day” on 7 dad communities, you are going to split the answers across the 7 communities.
Comments don’t need aggregation.
Look, we obviously have a difference in philosophy of the fediverse here.
So, let me back up a second and explain that.
The fediverse should be about communities being disparate. No single instance, no single mod or admin owning an idea, or the consequent community that forms around an idea. Part of why reddit became so horrible was the inability to have a viable alternative community around a subject when one went off the rails because someone had total control over a word, like “parenting”, or “knives” or “gaming”.
The more you consolidate communities, the more you give fewer entities control of a idea/concept/subject.
Comment aggregation is nice, if all you want is a single feed to scroll through, but the price of it is too high.
Alright, so let’s apply this principle.
You seem to be posting from time to time to !metal@lemmy.world. Where is the alternative community on another instance you crosspost to?
Hm, I’m not sure you are aware, but I am among the ones pushing for
So I am indeed aware of what you are saying, and I agree to an extend.
But as I said, you still need a minimum amount of activity to keep a community, alternative or not, active. Dads and parents communities aren’t active anywhere on Lemmy yet, so it’s more important now to first identify people, and then allow them to move or split.
Star Trek communities seems to coexist and be active enough because the topic is popular enough among the Lemmy population. It’s not the case for every topic.
Ummmm, welllll, I don’t actually post much to any other metal communities because they tend to have different rules for posting, and different people. This is one of those things where I’m a bad example of the “advice” I’m giving. I’m not a big poster anywhere. Wasn’t on reddit either tbh. I genuinely wish I could find the same “vibe” as the .world metal C/ that was also friendly to direct YouTube links. There’s a couple of good metal communities on lemmy, but they tend to dislike the YouTube links, or you catch hell for it from other users lol. It’s one of those where I’m not following my own beliefs because it screws up other people’s flow.
I get where you’re coming from about needing minimum activity to make a subject matter to build a true community. I even agree, it’s consolidating the smaller ones into a central one and hoping it can split up later rather than just disintegrating after some schism in the user base that I object to on a meta level.
I just think that spreading awareness of the various communities and encouraging crosstalk is a better long term goal.
Also, I hope that my word choices and phrasing don’t come off aggro or with ill intent. I’ve been reminded that tone isn’t conveyed well via text today with an unrelated chat away from lemmy. Since there’s been a few points where I might have taken my own words wrong, just want to clarify that if this was in person, my tone would be friendly and you’d see me smiling at someone that’s wanting to build good community.
No worries!