When the rush happened from redditors joining Lemmy, they basically went and remade every single subreddit, not once on a single instance, but many many times over many instances. This is a problem, because now we have a ton of dead spaces across the federation that are useless.
I am for merging, because the userbase is too small to sustain multiple niche communities. Lock 'em up, boys!
i agree with the merge, BUT, don’t do it on the biggest instance, so it slow the impact of DDOS here on lemmy
Agreed, Lemmy just doesn’t have enough users yet to fracture things as much as we did on reddit
I support the merge for now, but I’d want there to be a plan in place to reopen them at some point if/when there is enough of a user base to support them
Ideally those communities do serve different niches even though there’s a lot of overlap and it would be kind of a shame if we reach a point where there’s enough of a community ready to use them but they’re stuck with the community locked up
This is definitely the plan for sure. Whether we lock or leave open the niche communities, we don’t want them gone forever. This merge is just something we’re looking at to help encourage more posts and content in general, which hopefully will give people more reason to sub, and then once the userbase is enough to support, those niche communities can thrive. Locking those communities, if we go that route, is always meant to be temporary.
I hate duplicate posts. I support a merge.
There should be a native crosspost feature allowing users to crosspost to other communities but instead of creating a new instance of the post, it’s a link back to the original instance of the post.
Ngl I do kinda like option 1 to prevent a bunch of duplicate posts in the feed, but if thats the choice we should have some kind of parameter for when reopening would be appropriate. Like a yearly check in post, or a total sub size, or something.
I have no idea what the mod tools and such are like on Lemmy, so I don’t know how feasible it is, but I feel like a good way to do it would be to enforce tagging posts, and once we hit a certain threshold of users using that tag the relevant community gets reopened
Making up numbers on the fly, but maybe something like after 100 different users have made posts with a certain tag and at least 10 of them have made at least 5 posts the relevant community gets reopened, and the main cooking community makes a stickied post and makes some automod comments or something advertising that it’s back open.
A lot of online communities get a lot of their content from a handful of power-users, so making sure that you have a handful of people who are repeatedly making relevant content I think is just as important as making sure you have bulk people who may only contribute occasionally, which is why I included having some users who have made multiple posts
Also when that critical mass is reached, some strategic timing for when to reopen them may be a good idea. Might get some extra buzz and activity to kick things off by reopening BBQ a couple weeks before memorial day when people are getting ready for summer cookouts and ask culinary around November as people are starting to plan for thanksgiving and Christmas
Agree with merging. We could use tags in post titles (e.g. [Recipe], [BBQ], [Ask], etc) so we can easily pick out those that interest us, and also allow us to see if a particular subtopic is gaining more popularity.
This is something we have been discussing doing and I think it will help greatly with organization. Hopefully Lemmy integrates tagging at some point.
I’m mostly in favor of option one, but I am concerned that it could result in a cesspool filled with memes.
Without a good way to filter out memes, large communities that permit them can easily become unusable.
We definitely don’t want the community to be overcome with memes and while we don’t want to disallow memes all together, we actively monitor the communities for proper content. We want these communities to be about actually discussing food/cooking and helping eachother out mostly but having fun and laughing is very much a part of enjoying food, IMO. So memes will be allowed, but if it gets out of hand, we will make sure to let everyone know and discuss where to go from there.
I have posted here, and the top comments were from people who only commented (and contribute no OC) that it looked bad despite the posts being about technique/ ingredients. If everything needs to be Foodporn I’m out.
deleted by creator
