To me it feels like a matured Reddit. (At least most of the time 🙃)
I wish that a lot of communities would consolidate. It seems like there was such a rush, and all these people trying to stake out their homesteading claim, that the community with a capital C wasn’t able to develop. With reddit, subs would get big and shitty, then you’d see something like,“Hey, join us over at <fill in>. It’s like this sub, but with(out) <fill in>”. And that spinoff had enough momentum from the start to keep going.
I’m not a sports guy, but it’s like there are 30 NBA teams (I don’t know the number, don’t care, and irrelevant to what I’m attempting to stay). The first community should have been NBA@… until there are enough people visiting so that the fans of TEAMA can go create their own TEAMA@…. As things stand, instead of starting with 30 basketball fans having a common community to bullshit, we ended up with 30 communities with 1 person in each and often zero traffic.
The one thing I’d object to with the sports example is that I don’t wanna see game day threads for teams I don’t care about, but I’m totally open to general discussion of the league, including about teams I don’t follow. If literally JUST the GDT were split off to the individual team communities I’d be cool with it.
But I totally agree with the over-fracturing of interests. Every now and then I’ll see someone make a “spinoff” of a mostly dead community, just to post 2 or 3 things and stop. It’d be better if they just posted that in the existing community even though it only aligned 90% as well as they’d hoped.
With reddit, subs would get big and shitty, then you’d see something like,"Hey, join us over at . It’s like this sub, but with(out) ". And that spinoff had enough momentum from the start to keep going.
Except that’s not what happened. What you’re describing was very rare. The vast majority of the time, terrible subs with terrible mods or user bases stayed entrenched, alternatives never took off. The main sub would always get recommended, it was the one Google would show, it was the one that hit the front page, the small subs just never got that exposure and most dwindled.
It was a big issue people didn’t talk about much, and I like that Lemmy isn’t worrying about consolidating.
