Comment on Doesn't each community being local to each instance split the audience?

captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Yeah, as big as Reddit’s namespace for subreddits was, Lemmy’s is another dimension bigger because you can have one community per name per instance. This feels daunting and possibly confusing at first. But honestly Reddit wasn’t much better. In fact, I think Lemmy’s approach solves certain issues that Reddit’s approach created, such as:

r/actual_subreddit u/PM_ME_YOUR_GANGLIA registers r/nerves, then neuron enthusiasts come in to talk about the latest in sensory meat, except u/PM_ME_YOUR_GANGLIA is a terrible person who runs the sub like a complete asshole. So u/teh_whizzz opens up r/actual_nerves or r/nerve_tissue or whatever and that becomes the actual place for nervous system affectionados to hang out…until the meme spam becomes excessive and then r/nerve_memes has to split off…you know what I’m talking about.

There’s no reason for that to happen on Lemmy, because if the mods at !nerves@lemmy.ml won’t quit dipping their infected foreskins in the punch bowl, someone can open !nerves@lemmy.world or !nerves@sh.itjust.works. Eventually most traffic will move to the “actual” one that isn’t run by skid marks. Newcomers who think “I wonder if there’s any communities about nerves” will use the search communities feature, then check out the most popular one.

In the big Reddit Exodus 6 months ago, a lot of people joined the platform, created various identical communities on various instances…most of which went on to gain no traffic whatsoever. Everyone searching for communities ended up going with The Popular One for whatever topic.

Or, even if there are simultaneous functioning communities, this means one of two things: folks will end up subscribed to both, maybe the mods maintain slightly different aesthetics or house rules so they’re both useful in different ways, or the same posts get made to both so you only need to be subscribed to one.

Then, what if the instance a popular community was on goes offline? This can, has, and will continue to happen. The community can coalesce again on a different instance and keep right on tranglin.

source
Sort:hotnewtop