So, I love this site. I’ve been here more-or-less since the beginning, across various accounts. I also have accounts on other Lemmy instances.
One common pattern I see is that instances branch out their communities too soon, and overly dilute the conversation. It makes an instance that is ultimately not that active (compared to any of the big sites that don’t need naming, really) appear to be even less lively, due to so many instances with either nothing at all, a few month old posts, or a generic post linking to a projects blog.
Note that I am not criticizing the instance by pointing out the low activity levels - I really do love this place. It’s just a fact at the moment. You can switch viewing posts by new and scroll down a little to see we get around 5 - 6 posts per hour, occasionally a bit more and occasionally a bit less.
I think that having lots of inactive, dead looking communities is off-putting. I know that I certainly don’t feel encouraged to post in them. I worry this might have a similar effect on other users too.
I do understand that c/programming is deemed as something of a catch-all community, and so anyone could post there rather than the niche communities, but I’m not sure that this is totally obvious to everyone.
Personally, I feel we should purge all the tiny communities that have no posts (or just a single blog post, for example) and encourage people to post in c/programming. Then, new communities can be made when a particular topic becomes large enough to warrant divergence, either because it’s clearly a subject of interest to many users or because it ends up dominating c/programming. c/rust is an example of such a community, as is c/programmerhumor.
I am nobody here, and I was not asked for my opinion, but I just wonder if this topic has been thought about much? I really want this place to thrive. Do any other users here have an opinion? What do the instance admins think?
I think this is a pretty big problem with how people are using Lemmy in general
https://lemmyverse.net/communities shows 27,726 communities
https://join-lemmy.org/instances says Lemmy has 42.2k monthly active users (as of v0.19.0 that’s including people who only vote and don’t post/comment)
I just think that’s way too many communities to be sustainable, people jumped on Lemmy and tried to create a community to match every subreddit, and then they did it on multiple different instances too.
I’m not sure how to improve this. You could delete communities but then you lose post history and subscribers. You could close communities and make a pinned post, but then they clutter search results and they definitely look dead, because they are. There could maybe be a new Lemmy feature added to merge a community into another one (moving the posts over and then deleting the old community) but that would have complications with subscribers on other instances.
We switched up how we handle communities a couple times. We didnt start expanding horizontally until the main communities seemed stable and had some good activity (community creation was open publicly starting last month and before that there was the request zone). The posting activity is the same as it was in the previous systems, people just dont want to post and theres the 10% of people comment, 1% of people are posters rule (if its 5-6 posts per hour thats better than the past system as well)
The ones that are visible in new communities are empty mostly because they were just made (~ 100 coms made in the last month). The ones made by me and that are now handled by the vacant account are ones that have sources I can add to my rss reader and then post consistently. For example the elm community has weekly posts on things going on in the ecosystem. This means they wont be dead and should have a solid stream of posts as it builds up active users. Theyre made so they can start collecting people and subs over time rather than attempt to diverge and have nobody know to move over or people not joining at all since they looked for the language by name and didnt find anything (and then I assume people dont want misc changelogs of bug fixes posted to c/programming as well)
The most commonly used sorts in the instance are subscribed sort and local sort. If something is posted in one of the smaller communities people will interact with it in local sort. Crossposting is also highly recommended. I can maybe somehow make that more apparent than it already is
I understand. Do you think that making 100 communities “to start collecting people” is a bit counterintuitive, though? Just a quick browse through shows that the majority of these coms (including ones made much longer ago) are just dead. A lot of them have moderators that haven’t shown signs of activities in months, and the only posts are the RSS style feed dumps, with little sign of discussion. Would it not make more sense to just let people make communities who are interested in actually running the community? Including starting discussions, advertising the community, sharing interesting content within it, etc.
Please don’t take that as a criticism. I see that you do a lot around here, and I really appreciate your efforts. I’m just concerned that this mass dilution may hinder a lot more than it helps.
Even looking at some of the larger coms, like !gamedev@programming.dev, haven’t had activity in over 10 days. In my opinion, that makes it feel unappealing as a place to go and discuss and share things about that topic.
The 5-6 posts per hour I mentioned is a little disingenuous, too. Looking through it, half of those are a single user (Mac), who is just going through these empty communities and posting links to the project’s news feed.
Do you not think there would be some merit in having fewer, but more condensed and livelier communities?
I may well be wrong, I am certainly no expert in creating or running something like this. I am just drawing from the experience I’ve seen of places like old Reddit (back when it started) growing. They didn’t let anyone make subs until around two years in, at which point they had reached a critical mass of users that meant fracturing into subreddits didn’t leave the whole site feeling thin.
I think the better option rather than condense things into less communities is to crosspost things between the larger communities and the smaller communities and make the larger communities more apparent to funnel people into them
We tried the system with people interested in running it with the request system, it didnt work and people didnt actually boost things
Mac is my posting account. I can start crossposting a bunch of stuff I post on it into the general communities if the specific things have less than 100 active users and do some more discussion posts
May I ask, why do you think that is the better option? I understand people didn’t boost things when they were requesting communities, but are they boosting now?
I’m not certain that cross-posting a bunch of stuff and dumping project newsfeeds into communities is going to kickstart them much. I don’t think that can work with you doing it alone across so many communities. You need someone who is really keen on growing the community to be doing it, and if that someone isn’t around - I’d argue the community may not need to exist (until someone does arrive and wants to do that).
Again, this is your instance and it’s not my business how you run it, so feel free to tell me to mind my own business.
Growth over time and SEO
It gets a bunch of activity in the larger community while letting the smaller communities grow. People havent been crossposting currently so it hasnt been happening but I can encourage it more
I mean we are a link aggregator. It aggregates links into the communities for people to view. Its been working so far and ive managed to boost a bunch of communities to have a larger amount of active users/month (the last community on page 1 now has 42 users/month rather than before it was 10 users/month at the end of page 1
Okay, well if you are confident it’s working, then great. Presumably then, you don’t see that there are any issues with over-dilution?
Yeah no issues as long as theres spots for people to feel comfortable posting in and interacting in regardless of activity elsewhere (which are c/programming and c/no_stupid_questions) and which is then supported by the crossposts
Ill try to do a better onboarding system to guide people that way
Ill ramp up my posting speed, been doing some more setup for things in the admin team for the past bit as well as switching which rss reader I use. Expect more activity in the instance the next week
Do sites even index Lemmy in SEO? I haven’t found a case where a Google search yields a Lemmy thread organically, like it does with Reddit.
Yeah, we just have less content to pull from so people running into it on google happens less often
As a quick example of a community if you search up Concatenative Programming and scroll down a bit youll see programming.dev
Yeah, I just want to echo the growth over time comment. It’s still (relatively) early days of the Fediverse and Lemmy, and we’re still on the shallow part of the exponential growth graph. I mod the MAUI Community, which was created shortly before Xmas, and I made some announcements then (like on Mastodon, Daily Dew Drop, etc.) and some people joined then. But then I’ve also mentioned it again on a few other occasions since when it seemed appropriate (like the other day when I saw a notable dev still posting on Reddit), and each time I do it gains another subscriber or two. We just need to keep advocating each time there’s an opportunity. We’ve built it, and now we just need to wait for them to come. :-) And it’s been worthwhile, because when I have an issue I always post both here and on Mastodon, and sometimes I get a solution from Mastodon, but another time I got my solution from someone here (i.e. no-one from Mastodon responded, but someone here did, and the solution worked!). And of course, like Reddit, solutions posted here are easier to find than those posted on Mastodon. I think it’s great and just needs some time to grow (as people learn how the Fediverse works and what all the available services are, such as Lemmy instead of Reddit).
I mod the MAUI Community, which was created shortly before Xmas, and I made some announcements then (like on Mastodon, Daily Dew Drop, etc.) and some people joined then.
I’m late to the game but I should point out that the MAUI community is a textbook example of how communities should definitely not be created, and it was clear from the start that it was already born a dead community.
The C# barely gets a single post per week. The .NET community is even more of a niche community, and in spite of all the non-organic posts it’s already dead.
Even though you were fully aware of this and you were repeatedly pointed out the obvious fact that a niche of a niche won’t take off, you ignored te feedback and still went ahead with the creation of the community. Which is of course dead.
Lemmy in general and programming.dev in particular already have groups with traction. I hope that moving forward the group creation process is based on peeling specialized topics from existing communities. Otherwise the MAUI fiasco will repeat itself and we’ll end up with an even longer tail of dead communities vulnerable to spam and takeovers by bad actors.
dead communities
None of the communities you have mentioned are dead. In fact according to the January stats, all the communities you mentioned have above average usage.
Noted that you ignored this comment of mine…
it’s been worthwhile
Take your gaslighting somewhere else…
I don’t disagree, I do think there are too many communities for the number of active users (both here, and Lemmy in general). What I’d be interested to know is this: Is there some research into the subject, or even a write-up from someone who has successfully grown a thriving community in the past?
I’d argue that with !programming@programming.dev being the “default” community, this is somewhat mitigated. It’s not policed, so you can post there about Rust, Godot, Python, or whatever you like and nobody will moderate you or ask you to move along. Maybe the “over-dilution”, as you call it, hurts the instance as a whole. But if you think of Lemmy as something wider than a single instance, it matters less. !programming@programming.dev is the flagship instance here, and it’s a large one by Lemmy standards. People will subscribe to that from all over the Fediverse.
So I think it comes down to your view of programming.dev as an instance vs Lemmy as a network of federated communities. Ultimately, people will just subscribe to whatever instances interest them - and hopefully Lemmy as a whole will thrive, including this instance.
