Why consolidate communities?
One of the advantages of a decentralized platform like Lemmy is the ability to create parallel communities on the same topic. “You don’t like how a community is being moderated? Go to another instance and start a new community!” (with or without blackjack and hookers)
However, this is also a double-edged sword. The creation of multiple communities on the same (or similar) topics can also fragment the userbase, leading to very sparsely populated communities.
A few perspectives in favour of consolidation: (credits to @Ashyr@sh.itjust.works, @otter@lemmy.ca, and @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone)
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11171955
I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.
I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.
So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.
Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.
https://lemmy.ca/comment/8823953
I like this because people showing up to those communities might think that topic doesn’t have activity on Lemmy, when it actually does.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8370860
I sometimes think that unmoderated communities should be closed, and just be left and locked with a pointer to the active one. In case an issue arises with the active one, they can still be unlocked and used as back up.
Consolidating electric vehicle communities
Applying these principles to the EV communities on Lemmy, let’s take an overview of what currently exists:
General-purpose:
- !electric_vehicles@lemmy.ml (active)
- !electricvehicles@lemmy.ml (active)
- !evs@lemmy.world (active)
- !electricvehicles@lemmy.world (inactive)
- !electriccars@lemmy.ca (inactive)
- !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net (active)
- !electricvehicles@lemm.ee (inactive)
- !electricvehicles@reddthat.com (inactive)
- !evs@notdigg.com (inactive)
Location-specific:
- !evs@feddit.uk (active) (UK-specific, European welcome)
- !evs_ireland@lemmy.ml (inactive) (Ireland-specific)
- !electricvehicles@midwest.social (inactive) (US-specific)
Other:
- !electricvehicles@gearhead.town (active)
Do all of these communities serve a distinct purpose? If not, could we consolidate some of them?
While Lemmy does not currently have a built-in way of moving or merging communities, @Blaze@lemmy.cafe has had some success with pinning an explanation post directing users to the new community and locking the old one. Is this something which could be applied to the EV communities on Lemmy?
The next question is, of course “Which communities should we consolidate to?”
Given the general sentiment to move off of ML (for ideological reasons) and off of World (to avoid centralization of instances), my proposal would be !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net. I think the SolarPunk instance is a nice match for an EV community, but I am interested to hear what others think.
Looks !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net is 3rd place in subscriber count!
Definitely encouraging! Although I think active users/week and users/month is a more meaningful metric than total subscribers. Many of the subscribers on the larger instances are remnants of the 2023 APIcalypse, and not active accounts.
Great initiative, thank you for this
Just join them all.
Do all of these communities serve a distinct purpose?
They serve the purpose of redundancy. Power-tripping moderators and administrators are less able to silence reasonable dissent when dissenters can just run to other instances. When various instances fail, the others pick up automatically.
Having too many communities prevent potential posters from knowing where to post. They usually are not going to crosspost their content to a dozen different communities, and will just not post at all.
Power tripping mods can be reported on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Having too many communities prevent potential posters from knowing where to post.
Post in any of them, or any combination of them.
When I find a good community, I tend to join the communities they recommend. I would suggest Sidebar links to related communities for others to join.
Power tripping mods can be reported
What is the purpose of such a report? Seems like pointless drama in a decentralized environment.
The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.
Having one community helps a lot with growth; a few people posting to a few small communities vs. all of them posting to the same larger community.
Once a community has momentum (ex. world news, technology), this is less important and having multiple communities all open at once isn’t a big deal.
In this case, I think all the people from those communities want to see more content and discussion. If any of the communities listed above want to stay open for whatever reason, I’m sure people here will respect that choice too.
What is the purpose of such a report?
I don’t like the drama or fights in the comments, but I find that communities like that serve as a way to start discussion about moving. Same as on centralized platforms (reddit), if mods are power tripping or making poor decisions, posts like that help with an organized move to a new space. The same place can be used if an instance goes down, a mod disappears, etc. The advantage of the Fediverse is that it’s really easy to move to new communities if/when there are problems with a community/instance.
(posting with my alt since there are some federation issues with this post right now)
Post in any of them, or any combination of them.
You only seem to have two posts, is there another account where you post more?
What is the purpose of such a report? Seems like pointless drama in a decentralized environment.
Calling out power tripping mods, which allows people to switch to communities with better mods
Just join them all.
The stats show that the majority of users don’t do that. And even if they did, it still wouldn’t solve the problem that multiple communities on the same topic fragments the userbase, leading to very sparsely populated communities. When all the discussion occurs in a single community, the discussion is much more vibrant, instead of users shouting into a bunch of separate voids.
That’s a ton of EV communities. Considering the threadiverse has a mere ~50K MAU, that’s definitely going to be detrimental to growth.
I’m in favor of your idea, both for the reasons you stated, and for an additional one.
Due to some instances defederating from each other, the choice of instance for a community becomes more important if its to become a one stop shop for everyone. As an example, Beehaw, which is quite an active community, cannot access any .world communities, making .world a poor choice just on grounds of overall reach alone.
!electricvehicles@slrpnk.net as the core community is a good choice, as it is only defederated from a small handful of extreme instances, so its reach should be pretty decent.
I have been considering moving mealtimevideos and documentaries away from .world for similar reasons, as it sucks that all of the content I post there isn’t available to beehaw users.
!electricvehicles@slrpnk.net as the core community is a good choice, as it is only defederated from a small handful of extreme instances, so its reach should be pretty decent
This is a good point I had not addressed. Thanks for making it.
