Title is a bit of a loaded question but I tried to fit it into one sentence.
Do you think Lemmy’s search and use functions are hurt by all the communities that were made and abandoned during the 2023 Redditfugee influx? As in, do you think that Lemmy would be better off if some of these communities were consolidated into larger general pages until it gets a big enough user base to warrant individual communities for specific TV shows, for example.
We could use some consolidation - if anything, it’s not general enough in some areas, and others are so tightly defined it’s a circle-jerk.
Edit: had a rethink - I mean it’s all very flat. I wouldn’t mind a small hierarchy to find the topic, and more granularity in subgroups.
What hurts Lemmy more are the communities that are repost bot communities.
I get the need for the repost bots during the starts of the migration of Reddit users to Lemmy, but these days they just make it hard to be seen in some communities, they prevent new original content to develop in those communities as no one will want to post just to have their post drowned out by content that doesn’t even come from this place.
Kbin / Mbin actually fixed this by allowing if a Community isn’t managed for 3 months by mods then it will be available for people to claim to admin. This allows people to keep the Community going and hopefully blow some life into it.
I seem to recall on reddit there were a lot of subs that somehow had mods who modded hundreds of subs, and didn’t participate and weren’t a part of the actual communities. It seemed these people just liked collecting subs. I’d worry that with an automated system people like this (or even bots) will show up, and just start squatting (so to speak) on the mod rights to communities. Time will tell, I guess, with growth.
@ragica it’s worked the opposite way so far.
People who made a bunch of communities and then didn’t participate are the ones who were displaced after the update by active mods. I help out at a couple like that myself.
The system can always be tweaked if it doesn’t scale right, but for now it’s been quite revitalizing.
Not any more than reddit is hurt by dead subreddits. I don’t see it as a big problem. But I think discovery is a bigger issue - finding new communities.
Reddit doesn’t have dead clones. Lemmy is full of them.
Userbase is sufficient for generic topics, not specific ones (there are exceptions)
!moviesandtv@lemm.ee is quite active, !dundermifflin@lemmy.ml not so much
But people insist on creating incredibly specific niche communities, I’m certain because they want to establish their own fiefdoms when this “blows up”.
