this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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That's not exactly how it works, FMA in communities and groups is usually that most users will likely consolidate towards single locations over time, lemmy.ml being one of the larger instances. Just because other communities can be created on other instances doesn't mean there is any actual competition (once late into the game), unless the communities themselves are so far broken or unusable or poorly moderated that a migration event does occur elsewhere.
It's the reason why subreddits like /r/pics have millions of subscribers and /r/pics2 is barren. Sure, it's not exactly the closest analogy, but lemmy.ml isn't going anywhere. Once adoption occurs, say in a few years time, do you think people are going to move communities?
Regardless, there isn't an argument for an individual user to be able to be moderator of several dozens to hundreds of communities.
I still don't get it. If a r/pics mod goes to lemmy.ml and makes c/pics, I can go to lemmy.ca and make c/pics, and you can go to kbin and make m/pics. You're right that probably one of those pics communities is going to end up being the favorite but that doesn't mean the others can't post good relevant content. Also no one needs to "move communities" you can subscribe to every version of pics that that exists. I'm subscribed to multiple different communities of the same topic because each of them are going to have their own slant or take on the topic. Over time the content and comments will be what determines my favorite of them, not which is the biggest.
On the fediverse I think content is king, much more than anywhere else, simply because there can be so many versions of the same topic. The one that rises to the top will be content based, not based on server or who the owner is. I can create 50 communities, but can I post 50 communities worth of good content and foster 50 communities worth of good comments? I mean, maybe. But probably not.
Yeah, I do think people will move communities. This happened all the time on reddit when a mod or mods were being terrible and it's even easier to do on Lemmy, so that is very likely to happen.
I don't know. This is all new to me (and thank you for engaging with me and helping to educate), so I don't know what will incentivize or discourage people from shifting between communities, but based on what little I know, I don't see why they wouldn't since there is very little friction to doing so.
Your subreddit analogy feels very apt, actually. r/pics2 might be a graveyard, but I can think of two instances where part or most of a community moved to an alternate version of the subreddit, largely because they didn't like the moderation.
Go to r/Cubs, created September of 2008. It's got a reasonably healthy 28k subs, but the posts and comments are pretty lackluster and gamethreads are graveyards. Contrasted to r/ChiCubs, which was created 7 years later and has nearly 3x as many subs and is a much more active community - essentially this is the subreddit for Cubs baseball fans on reddit.
Very similar story in r/publicFreakout and r/Actualpublicfreakouts, the latter of which splintered off from the former on largely idealogical grounds.
Many people move between them, some people participate in both, and perhaps one day one of them will "win" if the other withers away.
It seems to me a similar dynamic could play out across instances of the same subreddit name if some old reddit power mods come and squat on communities before they are fully formed. To use a fake example, [email protected] vs [email protected]