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.