When you look at https://beehaw.org/communities, you can see that there are only a few communities, but they are diverse enough to cover most of the topics you would have to discuss on the Internet.
I sometimes think that could be a model we could try to replicate across several instances:
- technology: !technology@lemmy.world
- gaming: !games@sh.itjust.works
- chat: !casualconversation@lemm.ee
- etc.
It would allow to aggregate people around a few core communities and avoid dispersion and fragmentation. Of course, it would need some agreements in the community, and some people would probably want to keep their community as “the main one” opposed to the other, but that could still be valuable.
What do you think?
My issue generally boils down to it being optional and something instance admins and mods would have to opt in and maintain, because if it were a technical solution, it wouldn’t be able to exclude instances someone has an issue with. It would also negatively impact the content variety due to different instance rules AND community approach.
E.g. there are several gaming related communities, but they all differ. Some allow bots, others doesn’t. Some allow memes, others’ doesn’t. Some limit posts, others doesn’t. And all of them are on different instances that have different rules and moderators.
I think it also depends how popular the topic is.
Gaming, as you said, exists on several platforms, with different mods and teams because it’s a quite popular topic.
On the other hand, I also regularly browse !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id, and they seem pretty similar to me (be it rules or content wise), they are also lacking some activity, so they would probably benefit from being merged, and having one as the reference.
lemdro.idis a specialized instance, not a general one. !android@lemmy.world was also created and popularized by thelemdro.idteam, but when they decided to move to a dedicated instance, LW admins just installed their own moderators to that community. Also, there are more: !android@lemmy.ml, !android@programming.devBasically any community on LW will have an equivalent community somewhere else. Because even if people don’t plan long term to stay on LW, they will use it as a cheat code to grow and then move somewhere else. And then LW admins just takes over the old communities.
I’m not sure how either side would agree to “merge”, since wanting self-governance was the reason the split happened in the first place.
I see where they come from, but from a new user perspective, it’s quite confusing to see too similar-looking communities, more or less similarly active, with more or less the same type of content, and not know where to post
!android@programming.dev is more software development oriented, and !android@lemmy.ml has the typical lemmy.ml spin to it.
Indeed, but on that point I’m not sure how the LW is currently moderated. The moderators don’t seem that active (it’s a trend I’ve noticed among a few LW communities). If I have some time in the coming days, I might contact them to see if they are still interested in managing that community, or if uniting forces with lemdro.id would make more sense