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
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.
@scrubbles Kbin now has an automated process so if a community owner has been absent for a month, another person can just take over, and either revive it or delete it. Abandoned communities are also listed as abandoned. Would be really good if Lemmy could have something similar!
!movies started great and has over 4,000 subscribers, but suffered from an absent mod for a long time. Recently I made myself its owner and am slowly bringing it back to life.
That's why I was a little bemused at first when @Blaze (who I somehow mistook for a bot!) started crossposting all our new posts, but I actually don't think it's a problem. Interestingly, I've checked the list of upvoters for those crossposted articles across the two communities and it's not the same people in each. And only 21 people from my instance subscribe to moviesandtv.
I think it's good for mods to have these conversations. As the fediverse develops and discovery gets better (e.g. publicly shareable multi-feeds) things will start to grow or disappear organically and different communities will have different rules and flavours.
To take the example of movies again, already !movies has a somewhat different flavour than !moviesandtv which includes television.
Fragmentation can be cleaned up, but I also think decentralization is one of the important strengths of the fediverse, and we should be patient with small communities.
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