Similar small Lemmy communities need to merge to survive.
Small communities that are similar should think about mushing together for activity. Example: Hiking, Backpacking, Thru Hiking. It will generate more Activity and then branch out. We have too many niche pages that won't be active.
Agree, in the great reddit migration everyone came over and just created communities for everything. Now that the dust has settled we have hundreds of one person communities and so many similar ones.
Personally I'd like to see the admins go through their communities and say if there is only one member or if the only mods have been dormant to lock the communities and pin a post saying the community is up for adoption. At the very least that'd stop some of the hemorrhaging
Honestly, a pinned post linking to the “big” community would go a long way. Basically just “this community is abandoned. Go try [active community] instead.” But that would require the mods of those smaller communities to actually cede mod power to the larger ones. And if you know anything about online mods, you know that’ll never happen.
Yeah, which is why I think it needs to be an admin thing. It's posted automatically, but hey the mod can always remove it and keep the community going. But from what I see... 90% of them haven't logged in in months and probably wouldn't even notice. They log in again and want to pick it up again? Just remove the pinned post
Yeah, I know there's just no way for users to do it. If there's only one mod and they're dormant then there's not a lot of options, and there are people who probably would want to take over the communities. There should be a "vote of no confidence" option, but obviously that could be abused. That's why just scanning and seeing which ones are dead first might be nice.
We not only desperately need "multilemmys," the implementation needs to go further than R*ddit did by making them public and maybe even by automatically creating ones for communities in different instances with the same name by default (but allowing mods to opt out).
I know you mean well op, but you are asking for people to make /another/ dead community. the communities didn't work out. most won't. it's okay, that's true on reddit too. essentially:
eventually, if there is a community big enough to survive, it'll find a home just fine.
I see your point, and I agree that it would be nicer to just have to follow one community instead of a million smaller ones. There's always cross-posting. When you make a post and there are several communities for the same thing, post on the smallest one and then cross post it on the other ones.
Each community has a reason to exist, maybe different rules and different moderators. It's up to them to arrange a merge or the admins to archive inactive communities.
In fairness I think that's because people make multiple posts rather than just using the crosspost feature. But some mobile apps don't have crosspost yet, so here we are.
As much as I hate the bot content on principle, communities that either repost reddit or scrape some other aggregator at least have enough content for a community to begin to form around it. There just aren't enough posters anywhere.
Agreed; that does seem like an issue right now. For example, I like watches. And while there is - A - watches community, there’s also niches for expensive, affordable, mechanical, vintage, etc. We’re really not at the level of content where it makes sense to fragment it that much. I’d rather see all those posts rolled into one community until you reach enough of them to justify the split.
I’ll be doing my part to generate some content, but it’ll take a concerted effort to grow things.
I had a quick look at the 3 you quoted, and they all seem equally dead, with all the mods either missing or even banned.
If you are interested in reviving it, feel free to select one, request its moderation to the admins of that instance, then post on all of the others to let people know that you are reviving the other.
!cooking@lemmy.world had a similar discussion a few weeks back when they noticed they were spread too thin, with !recipes@lemmy.world for instance. You can see now that !recipe is locked, and has a pinned post to redirect to !cooking