Why consolidate communities?
One of the advantages of a decentralized platform like Lemmy is the ability to create parallel communities on the same topic. "You don't like how a community is being moderated? Go to another instance and start your own community!" (with or without blackjack and hookers)
However, this is a double-edged sword. The creation of multiple communities on the same (or similar) topics can also fragment the userbase, leading to very sparsely populated communities.
A few perspectives in favour of consolidation: (click to expand)
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11171955
I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.
I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.
So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.
Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.
https://lemmy.ca/comment/8823953
I like this because people showing up to those communities might think that topic doesn’t have activity on Lemmy, when it actually does.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8370860
I sometimes think that unmoderated communities should be closed, and just be left and locked with a pointer to the active one. In case an issue arises with the active one, they can still be unlocked and used as back up.
Credits to @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected]
How consolidate communities?
While consolidating communities can counteract userbase fragmentation, it is not an easy process for users to do, and so I thought I'd write up and share this guide.
Taking inspiration from @[email protected]'s excellent blogpost, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where the pancake userbase on Lemmy is heavily fragmented, could benefit from consolidation.
Step 1: Identify duplicates
Search lemmyverse.net/communities for 'pancakes', as well as common synonyms (hotcake, griddlecake, flapjack). In our hypothetical scenario, we get the following search results:
Open each community on its home instance, note the frequency of posts, and check whether the moderators are active. From this, you will often get a hunch for what might be the best community to consolidate to, but you should still keep an open mind as you proceed to the next step.
Edit1: To avoid centralization on large instances, I typically prefer consolidating towards smaller instances, provided that they are well managed.
Step 2: Solicit input
Create a post on [email protected]. The post should contain the following:
- A brief reminder on the detriments of userbase fragmentation and the advantages of consolidation.
- The list of duplicate communities you've identified for a given topic.
- An invitation for discussion and, optionally, your recommendation of a community to consolidate to.
Example post here (electric vehicles).
Once you have posted, create a top-level comment for each community in which you reach out to the moderators, administrators, and contributors for their opinions.
Example comments: (click to expand)
Paging [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) active moderator @[email protected]
Would you be open to consolidating this community with one on another instance, perhaps [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])?
Also paging active contributor @[email protected] for their thoughts.
[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) moderator @[email protected] is inactive.
Paging admin @[email protected]. Would you be open to consolidating this community with one on another instance, perhaps [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])?
Paging [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) moderator @[email protected]
How would you feel about a potential influx of posters and commenters from other instances? Would you be open to adding additional moderators, perhaps those who were active contributors or moderators in pancake communities on other instances?
These comments will hopefully spark discussion among the pancake enthusiasts on Lemmy.
Edit2: There will often be users advocating for consolidation to whichever community currently has the most subscribers/activity. When this community is on of the larger instances, feel free to gently remind people of the risks of centralization.
If any two communities agree to consolidate, you can move onto step 3.
Step 3: Consolidate communities
When a decision is reached between any two communities, one community can then be closed, and redirect users to the other. You should recommend that the moderator take the following actions:
Example comment: (click to expand)
Would you be able to do the following?
- Lock
[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) by checking "Only moderators can post to this community"
- Create one final post on
[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) announcing the consolidation to [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])
- Rename the community to "[Dormant] moved to
[[email protected]](/c/[email protected])"
Changing the community display name is particularly helpful for users when they are searching for communities.
When to NOT consolidate communities?
If there exist two active communities on the same topic, and they have a different significant difference in geographical focus, political leanings, or moderation style, these communities should not be consolidated. This would be an example of the advantages of parallel communities in the Fediverse.
TL;DR:
- Find all the communities on a given topic (easy)
- Convince people that consolidation is a good idea (medium)
- Get people, many of whom may be reluctant to see a community on their home instance locked, to decide on a which community to switch to (challenging)
- Contact the moderators (or the admins, if the mods are inactive) of each of the
n-1 communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (simple, but tedious)
It can be a bit of a pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I've seen many more failures than successes, but given the potential benefit for the Fediverse as a whole, I thought I'd write up and share this guide. Feedback is welcome :)
There is a whole instance for hardware news and reviews.
This is a very good initiative that I want to see succeed! My immediate feedback is that I avoid instances and communities without clearly defined rules so that’s something to consider.
I would also prefer to avoid a situation where we had shows & movies dedicated instance that turned out to be too much for the admin and went poof and so I need to know I can put my trust in a new dedicated instance. I understand it’s a bit of a chicken & egg problem but we need things to be stable during migration waves.
Let me know which communities are missing rules and I will take a look. I'm running these alone but I'm more than accepting of any help I can get.
I did offer to put all the topic-specific instances under a consortium of admins, but no one has yet taken up on it.
I'm well aware of the issues of instances being run by overwhelmed enthusiasts that crash and burn, though. But thankfully Communick has started to show a little bit of healthy growth, so the risk of me being forced to shut down are as low as they ever been.
This is just me providing input as a user that posts things because I like to post things and I do it for myself. I already did 2 years of community service when modding a national subreddit which led to crashing and burning so I’m not taking any responsibility for anything anymore :p
You might want to have a look at this comment:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28718268/13761862
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28718268/13763932
If he wants to run things like that then that’s fine, I encountered things that are showstoppers to me before I even got to that point in my evaluation. I imagine some time in the future instances like that will have more point than today but they’ll also have to provide something extra on top of regular Lemmy experience.
What are those things? In the sibling post I wasn't asking you to directly to do the work, but just to please point me at the issues that you see are preventing you from joining and participating...
And you might also be interested in this one: https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/114078395548515532
And in case you are wondering, March is turning out to be even better. Conversion rate is already at 40%. Revenue has got to the point where the operation is self-sustainable.
With two posts in the last 2 weeks?
If I feed the communities with mirrors from Reddit, people complain that they are being spammed. If I don't, you complain that is empty.
If I say that I am running these instances on my own, people say that is a risk. If I offer them to be put under a consortium of admins, you say that "I just want others to bear the costs".
There is no point in arguing anymore.
It's empty because you cannot sustain posting organically to all those communities by yourself.
People aren't posting to those communities and instances because there are more established communities on more established instances.
My point was more that you don't seem to be able to find other admins who want to join in your project of those 20 instances.
Every admin team here manages one instance. You're the only admin wanting to manage 20 at once.
I already asked you many times to not shield your opinions by arguing about what "other people do".
There is nothing stopping you to say "I don't want to centralize things around the big instances, so I rather post on the topic specific ones". And you seem perfectly fine making the effort to push consolidation around lemm.ee and even lemmy.film, but flat out refuse to extend any help to the topic-instances that I run.
It's fine that you don't want to support anything I am proposing because you want to keep this free from "commercial ventures". It's fine if you are a hater. But at least do me a favor and stop pretending you aren't.
Operations-wise, managing one, two or 20 instances is the same thing if you have enough automation.
Also, if the instances are not open for users, the real work is not on the operations side but on moderation. This is something that can be done by others that are not admins.
(and before you come back with "modding a remote community is hard", I would be okay with opening user accounts for moderators on the instances)
And you keep ignoring the fact that it's still the reality. Nobody posts on [email protected] , but it's not against you, nobody posts on [email protected] either.
You keep ignoring that, and trying to scapegoat me as the cause of that, but I'm not preventing anyone posting to your communities, people just don't, because they prefer more active communities, and active posters prefer established communities on established instances.
Yes, and you know that I'm building communities on other instances to promote decentralization
The main difference between those admins and you is that they don't come up aggressively to me like you usually do, and are doing right now.
For people reading this: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39358768/17132379
You love to point out past discussions, but you only show half of the story. Where is the link to the post where we had more people (beyond me) saying "let's post on soccer.forum instead of LW" and you refused? You preferred to continue on LW (even when you were basically alone posting by yourself there) and the best excuse you found was that you didn't like the domain name. When I said "I can get a .football domain" (which I did, btw) you went then to say "oh, please don't do that" and expressed some concern trolling about the cost of the domains.
So, forgive me if I sound "aggressive", but all I am doing is pointing out the inconsistencies between what you say you want and what you end up doing.
At the time I was still building the community. As you pointed out, I was the only poster there.
After a while, a few other people started posting there, one became mod, and we moved it to Lemm.ee
Just because sometimes things take some time doesn't mean I'm inconsistent.
At that time, there were more people posting on soccer.forum. This means that, if you had joined me and the others on soccer.forum, the network effects would grow in its favor.
So, yeah, you could've helped me and the topic instances. You could have helped with decentralization a lot more than "moving from the first to the second largest instance". But for some personal reason you refrained from it.
And again, it's fine if you don't want to help, but don't go around acting like your hands are tied.
I scrolled soccer.forum all the way to 6 months ago and only found @[email protected] as the other regular poster. Did I miss something?
[email protected] is 2 months old, so 6 months seems enough in the past to see what was happening back then.
The best is the enemy if the good. Lemm.ee is a well managed instance, and still their first community in the most active ranking is 52th: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
Every once in a while I try and create activity over there, but it's not getting any traction. Part of that is because [email protected] just doesn't work conceptually. Especially with how communities federate out using the name as hashtags.
Ok, let's see if [email protected] does any better...
There are also some other people posting highlights via Mastodon.
But it doesn't matter if it was one or two people. One or two people are already more than the zero you had at LW.
Please, stop trying to rationalize your behavior. Your actions have already proven where your values and interests are, and where they are not.
I'm not expecting to change your mind and I'm not expecting any form of cooperation from you anymore. All I'm asking of you now is to be honest and outright state that you simply are opposed to what anything I do, build or propose.
I don't think @[email protected] is the issue. The football community is a terrible example because it was kinda established and when it came to moving, everyone wanted to keep posting at football, so it was easy to transplant.
I can see your vision, but I can see what Blaze is saying in that it's better to work on one at a time than trying to make them all a success at once.
I'm not saying he is "an issue". What I am saying is that he refused to help at every opportunity.
He is already actively promoting and posting more than a handful of communities on lemm.ee and others. The only communities where he consistently found justifications not to help are the ones I run.
To repeat: I am not demanding anything from him and I am not entitled to anyone's goodwill. But if someone has any form of objection or issue with me or my work, I'd rather they make it explicit so that everyone else can evaluate for themselves than sticking with this eternal avoidance and non-committal position.
Okay, so you own a couple instances I would like to see be successful for multiple reasons, but the point he's trying to make is that no one is taking responsibility for them. There's no regular posters. Long before anyone else can help, there needs to someone taking personal responsibility to post and make the community active, even on their own. That's normally the admin since it's their vested interest.
Now for football, you don't care enough about football or pretty much any of the instances you host to make them active AS AN INTEREST. That's not a slight on you, your passion is the stuff behind the scenes and I don't think I've seen one of your instances go down, so you're clearly epic at it. But what @[email protected] is suggesting is that you find someone to lead each instance as it was their baby. Someone who will post into the void until someone else joins in. And I agree, each instance, whether yours or someone else's, needs someone to lead.
There's of course exceptions to the rule, but given what you put in, you deserve success and to get that, there needs to be real content. If you post it, they will come! Get a stake holder to lead the charge on posting and others will join in. Well, I will at least.
That is not true. Football, Basketball, Hardware, Self-Hosting, Web3/Ethereum, Photography are all things that I created because it were topics I followed on Reddit. I still post, but finding content to post to bootstrap dozens/hundreds of communities is a full-time job.
Short of paying someone else to do it, I've tried pretty much anything. If you have any ideas, I'm all ears.
I genuinely put a lot of thought into this regularly. I absolutely believe that it's just a matter of finding the right person/people for you to match up with and the rest will follow naturally and abundantly.
This comment is 6 months old: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28718268/13761862
Not sure what is avoidant or non-committal about this
"My position is
As a way to try to help him to get why people are not joining, I pointed out that
I already due my due diligence when I choose an instance to host a community I post too. Rglullis do not pass this. I'm not avoiding saying no to him, I think they are a good sysadmin and do a good job, but they need a backup.
Hope that clarifies things a bit. "
The more time passes, the more you are being proven wrong and the less you are willing to concede:
Couldn't that apply to lemmy.film as well? Why were you then okay with posting there, but not on soccer.forum or metacritics.zone?
And how are you going to cover the ~4000€/year to operate the topic based instances?
How? Centralization was happening on Reddit when it was privately owned (/r/soccer vs /r/football), network effect is not related to donations.
This is true but text based forums are in decline in the general population, and Reddit is still benefitting from the network effect. There's a reason why there's no Bluesky for Reddit: the userbase and growth potential is too small.
As a side note, monetization of a forumli or social media is always going to be reluctant. See this recent thread on Discuit: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/ofdJxMA_
The vast majority of people were against a 5$ one time fee.
Lemmy.film went down in October 2023: https://lemmy.world/post/7206971?scrollToComments=true
Metacritics first post is from that timeframe: https://metacritics.zone/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&sort=Old
Did you expect me to go to another single admin instance just after having lost a previous one?
The cost to operate the instances are already sunk with the rest of the infrastructure that I have to operate the rest of Communick.
This is an apples to oranges comparison. No financial resources are needed to run a subreddit.
Again you and your argumentum ad "other people"...
Why is so hard for you to say "I don't want to pay for it?" Why is it so hard to plainly state that you don't think that the work of admins is not worth anything?
Ah, my bad. I thought lemmy.film going down was a recent event. In any case, how much longer will my instances have to stick around for you to accept that they are not going anywhere?
Is this new? This seems different from
Two weeks ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39358768/17128846
People on Reddit still wanted their posts to be seen, and so would post on the most active communities.
I pay for my instances, but not 30€ per year, nor do I expect anyone else to do. On top of that, I thought that the Lemmy infrastructure was now sunk with the rest of Communick?
I am providing relevant data, that choose to discard. Another relevant data is that out of all of the people in this community, only me and SaberW4ke are replying to you, and none of us are convinced with your way of handling things.
How much longer are you going to tell people to "put their money where their mouth is"? (See first paragraph)
Also, just to clarify,how much money do you need from the Lemmy community. Because at the moment there are two different messages
So here's the question: how much money should people pay for your 20 instances (as you said that the 30€ Communick Lemmy accounts are different from the 20 instances)
Because they are. You are taking two statements from two completely different contexts and mixing them together.
When I say "people need to put their money where their mouths are", I mean that the ecosystem will only mature and reach mainstream if the people that want to make it grow provide material support that goes beyond "paying for the cost of servers". They need to realize that if they want to get rid of Venture Capitalists, they themselves need to start showing to support and invest into the alternatives.
There are not enough admins out there who are willing to maintain the servers more than a few thousand users without being paid. For some of them, it might be a hobby. For everyone else, this is real work and it should be appropriately compensated. Until the people here start to show that they value the work being done by admins and developers to the point where people can make a proper living out of the service provided, we will be stuck in amaterurish, niche state of affairs. No matter how much people here are "against capitalism", this will only grow if people invest in it.
This has nothing to do with Communick, how much it costs me to operate it or how much I charge for the services. When I say "put your money where your mouth is", it can be by running your own instance from your home computer. Or contributing to the developers of a project that you like. Or running a crowdfunding campaign to get some Youtuber out of Youtube and into PeerTube. Or getting a $10/month server from elest.io with half of dozen of your friends and splitting the bill. Anything, as long as it more than "just the cost of the servers". Anything, as long as it shows a significant investment.
You cover the costs of the hardware. It's better than most, but far from enough to be considered an investment into the system. You are still relying on free labor from admins and developers.
Nothing. I am not expecting people to pay nothing there. Whatever it costs me to keep those instances running should be seen as an investment into the ecosystem. The more the ecosystem grows, the bigger the TAM and the more potential revenue my business can make.
I'm going to suggest another perspective to what you just said: what about the people making the platform alive?
The community we're in is make of these people. Every week, everyone who's busy shouting into the void for their community share their experience, how to make communities grow (like this guide).
There are dozens of Reddit alternatives on /r/RedditAlternatives, Lemmy Mbin and Piefed are the only ones with a chance of succeeding. Because people believe in the project, and are okay to spend their time and energy to make the platform alive. Without them, Lemmy would be just another empty Reddit clone.
On a corporate social network, content creator would be paid by the platform, as they attract people to it. But here, nobody expects that, and everybody does it for free.
You mentioned in another comment struggling to find people to organically post to your football community. It's because there are only so many of us. Devs, sysadmins, posters, mods, everyone gives their time (and I say time, as I think indeed hardware costs should be covered) to the platform, for free.
No. You tried that line of argument already and I am not convinced. When I am posting here I am not investing into the platform. When I make an edit on a Wikipedia page I am not expecting any form of validation or reward. It feels like "work" to you right now because you want to have someone to talk to. Once the network reaches a critical mass, you'd be able to just kick back and become just another participant like any other.
Not true. Who was getting paid by Reddit to write content there and ignore Digg? Who is getting paid by Bluesky to get people out of Twitter?
Switching social networks is a big cost and the overwhelming majority of people will not do it unless there is a very strong reason to do so. When it does happen, we see that those people will take on (re)bootstraping their communities and republishing the collective wealth of content they have found.
The Reddit Exodus didn't fail in 2023 because of lack of content. It failed because the overall system was not able to handle the influx of people. It failed because our systems are so precarious that an instance with less than 20k users can bring the whole network to a halt. These things will not fix themselves. They need actual resources, time and money.
Then let's agree to disagree.
I didn't say it felt like work, I said it takes time and energy. Volunteering takes time and energy, doesn't make it like work.
I was thinking more about YouTube and TikTok. Reddit used a different approach with bots accounts, as it's easier for text submissions than videos.
https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/reddit-faked-its-first-users-resurfaced-video-shows-co-founder-alexis-ohanian-admitting-99-of-early-submissions-were-fabricated/articleshow/119263428.cms
Bluesky isn't there yet. You follow football, how many top footballers have a Bluesky account?
Feel free to advocate for more money. You could even try a Kickstarter like the Pixelfed owner. As I said, I'm the only one answering to you, so I'm not sure how popular your message is.
But running an online service and keeping it functional is work. The fact that some people do it pro bono does not make it any less valuable. When it is not pro bono, people still need/should/want to be compensated for what they do. Same thing with software development.
You are not. My question to you is "why do you think that admins and developers do not deserve to be compensated for their work?" and you keep evading the answer. ;)
We disagree on software development and system administration being work or volunteering.
I'm not. It's been several times in this discussion that you use bad faith in our conversation. Don't be surprised when I don't want to post to your communities.
I'm having trouble parsing this. How exactly do we disagree? You think being an admin is not work? I don't get it.
If you think I am being dishonest, then please let's make it straightforward. Please respond to the following statements with "agree" or "disagree":
You want to run a business.
Other admins are giving their time and energy without expecting to be paid.
That's what I meant with the disagreement. Are you managing your instances pro bono or not? It seems like you are not, and you're the only admin who wants to create a business out of instances.
I don't think I'm going to answer the list of questions now because they require longer answers. Maybe later if I have some time.
Also, we've had that conversation many times. I see the local volunteers run library, or the hiking club, you want to make the system profitable so that admins and developers can make a living out of it.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27053532/13176946
Thank you for chiming in