Should we lock this community and redirect to !askgaming@piefed.social, which is actively moderated? Last post was 26 days ago
!askgaming@piefed.social seems more active
Most small communities pretty much need a single dedicated person to do 99% of the heavy lifting posting-wise at the current size of Lemmy.
And that's why it's usually recommended to find a more generalist community where there is at least another active poster.
Keeping a community active by yourself is quite tiring, and most people will drop it after a bit.
People often express this view. And, in practice, it does seem to mostly work that way. But why? There's no reason it should have to. There are many oldschool forum websites where the entire website as a whole has less members than there are subscribers to individual comms on Lemmy. Yet those forums have individual subforums with greater post volume/rate. Why should this be?
I think the problem is that most Lemmings are reddit refugees. They still have reddit-brain. They expect every Lemmy comm to be a constant firehose of content that they can just passively consume, and only occasionally post to. Even though the constant firehose nature of Reddit was largely bot-driven. So when there's no constant stream of content, people incorrectly think the userbase is too small, and check Lemmy less often... which means they post less often, which means there's less content. It's a vicious cycle.
I think people need to come into Lemmy with a healthier mindset. It is a community to participate in, not a feed to be consumed. Lemmy isn't Reddit, and shouldn't try to be.
Feel free to create a dedicated post on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip, we can discuss there how to help you with your community
No. The entire point of the Fediverse is so that no single site can monopolise discussion on a topic. Having multiple communities with overlapping themes is an expected and desired outcome.
And, to that point: the themes are indeed merely overlapping in this case, not identically the same. 'ask gaming' is about asking questions of the gaming community. 'let's talk...' lends itself to more in-depth discussions. They are not the same. There can be no justification for shuttering one in favour of the other.
People keep trying to force there to be 'one single comm to rule them all' for each given topic, as if this is reddit or something. That's literally the exact opposite of the point of the Fediverse.
You need a minimum level of activity to keep a community sustainable.
Without that minimum level, single active posters stop posting after a while and leave the platform altogether.
!fedigrow@lemmy.zip to see discussions between active posters
Why lock it? Seems unnecessary. The mission statement of this sub doesn't lend itself to daily posting - at least without significant effort - but I still like that it exists. 26 days ago isn't even that bad, there are other niche subs that see even more infrequent activity. Should we lock them too? There's been multiple posts here over the last few months that have actually gotten replies and traction.
It depends how niche they are, but redirecting to active subs allow to reduce https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/ for people, and create more activity in sustainable communities
What would be the inactivity time a community should have before getting locked?
!oldgamers@lemmy.world only has one post 6 months ago, beyond that it's an 8 months old post by me, than 10 months old posts. If we suggested to lock that one down, would that be okay?
Same for !timberborn@feddit.org and !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works. The first one hasn't had a post in 26 days, the other one gets a few posts per week. It would probably be better to lock the first down and redirect to the more active generalist community.
I don't really see the reason to preemptively lock communities in that manner, is there really much harm in letting them exist? I get consolidating communities that are literally clones of each other but none of your examples fall under that for me.
I personally wouldn't lock subs out of only inactivity at all. What if someone tries the Fediverse for the first time, sees that their niche sub exists and is faced with a "SUB LOCKED" message? Is that a better situation than them just seeing a long time having passed since last activity?