I still have no idea how Lemmy really works, and I had to sign up for this instance - I don’t know, I don’t see a platform growing on that. But maybe that’s the point. I’m trying to engage though! The Voyager app’s “import sub” feature from Reddit is brilliant.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- [email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
- [email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
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Duplicates are a minor issue. That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).
The problems with #3 are:
- Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
- Different comms have different rules, and in this situation rule enforcement becomes a mess.
There's no good solution for that. On the other hand, the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links:
- a new user might not know which comms to follow, but they can simply copy a multi-comm from someone who does
- good multi-comms are organically shared by users back and forth
Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it's that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover. Also note that the root issue is not exclusive to federated platforms, it pops up in Reddit too; it's a consequence of users being able to create comms by themselves.
About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) with a pinned thread like "go to [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])".
This is a minor part of the text, but I feel in the mood to address it:
I post once to gauge interest then never post again because I got choice paralysis
The same users who get "choice paralysis" from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who: can't be arsed to check rules before posting, can't be arsed to understand what someone else said before screeching, comment idiotic single-liners that add nothing but noise, whine "wah, TL;DR!" at anything with 100+ chars... because all those things backtrack to the same mindset: "thinking is too hard lol. I'm entitled to speak my empty mind, without thinking if I'm contributing or not lmao."
Is this really the sort of new user that we old users want to welcome here? Growth is important, but unrestricted growth regardless of cost is cancer.
Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
Maybe I am not fully understanding your point here but from my point of view this is just not true?
A lot of the traffic is going to be on very general topics like "memes" or "technology" where posts are going to fit pretty much every other similar community.
Plus, in this case whoever has the authorities to follow communities can decide if the posts fit, so you're not losing anything if posts from a more specific community like "wholesome memes" end up showing up in a more general "memes" community.
That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).
the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links
Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it’s that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover.
I respectfully disagree. In two minutes, I can easily find all the communities on a given topic and subscribe to them all. The problem is not discovery. The problem is fragmentation of the user base, as explained by popcar in their blog post:
Alright, time to post. But where?
[email protected]and[email protected]are both somewhat active... Should I post inaand crosspost toc? Maybe there's hope in other communities kicking off again, should I crosspost tobanddas well? Oh no, am I going to post 4 times just to find my fellow pancake lovers?!
Let me take this a bit further: After crossposting to all 4 pancake communities, I get three comments. One in
a,b, andd. Each comment is in a separate post and none of them interact with each other unless the poster opens each crosspost separately.
I do not see how Proposal 2 (multi-communities) solves the issue of fragmentation of the user base, while Proposal 3 (communities following each other) solves this quite elegantly.
About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking
[[email protected]](/c/[email protected])with a pinned thread like "go to[[email protected]](/c/[email protected])".
If you aren't already the moderator of n-1 communities on a multitude of instances, there are some pretty significant challenges:
- Find all the communities on a given topic (easy)
- Convince people that consolidation is a good idea (difficult)
- Get people, many of whom are reluctant to see a community on their home instance locked, to decide on a which community to switch to (sometimes impossible)
- Contact the moderators (or the admins, if the mods are inactive) of each of the
n-1communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (tedious)
It's a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I've had many more failures than I've had successes.
It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.
Same experience here
The same users who get “choice paralysis” from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who
I'm not so sure. I sometimes have choice paralysis again on a topic I'm not familiar with, and I'm sure quite a lot of other people do as well
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Never thought about communities following communities. It actually makes a lot of sense and would solve the fragmentation issue in an elegant and "democratic" way.
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Fully agree with solution three, federated communities is the way. Solution two is just dumb and is basically just the subbed feed
i literally just want it to work like it does on matrix: a room (community in this instance) is an independent thing that exists on all servers with users participating in it, and then each server can also assign aliases to the rooms (communities) like how we assign domain names to IP addresses, of which the room (community) admins can set one to be the main alias which is generally displayed in UIs.
so a community called "bagels stacked on dogs" could have aliases like #bagelsondogs:lemmy.chat, #bageldogs:lemmy.chat, #bagelsondogs:discuss.dogchat.com, #bagelson:dogs.net, etc etc and the community admins would of course want to set #bagelson:dogs.net to be the main way to reference the community.
I still think multi-communities would be a good feature, even if not for this particular problem. (For example, to a have a dedicated "music" feed that includes several communities for different music styles you are interested in.)
But if you sub to all of them then there is zero need for such a feed. It adds extra work of making the feed and having to select the feed. There is barely enough content for viewing subscribed my new, why split a post or two a day into a separate feed?
Multicommunities are/grouping communities is being discussed in this issue atm:
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