this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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I'm still put off by the sheer lack of comments on some communities like the main videos community on lemmy.world, where videos that'll have tens of thousands of comments on Reddit will have 100 votes, but 1-2 comments.
I miss a lot of niche subreddits like /r/HajimeNoIppo, /r/BJJ, and /r/IBS, but I can live without. What would be great is if the big communities had more engagement.
There also seems to be a lot of duplication of communities across instances. While I get the whole decentralised thing, it's pretty pointless to not have a mechanism to merge/join communities across instances that have the same topic. Why should lemmy.world and kbin have two competing pro-wrestling communities when neither gets a lot of posts/comments?
This wouldn't be an issue with more users overall, but more importantly, it's not "competition". I agree there should be something to help meld together similar communities, but what we don't want is there to be only one community. That was a huge problem with reddit: there was typically one sub, and that sub was as only as good as it's moderation, while none of the alternative subs would ever seriously grow. So terrible mods were entrenched in the big subs, while no one would ever get directed to the alternatives.
Hell, you want to talk about /r/videos, the moderation over there was absolutely terrible. They removed videos for any reason they felt like and curated a toxic community. But no alternative videos sub could ever take off, because /r/videos was always there, taking the traffic.
We don't want that here.
Communities need cross posting but they absolutely don't need consolidating.
The moderation is a separate concern, but I fully agree on cross-posting over consolidation, with moderation limited to wherever the initial posts were created. As someone that was a mod on a popular sub (/r/soccer) I can say that when you deal with those levels of traffic you absolutely need hard rules to ensure that only high-quality posts make their way through - and should Lemmy ever go through the same spike the same things will happen. You cannot just let people upvote/downvote as a quality filter because that's how to end up with bots winning, vote brigades, and content that focuses on the same shit. Some mods are useless, but I can happily say that /r/soccer was modded very well, despite insane challenges like users (literally) stalking mods, regular death threats, and some unhinged attempts to spam posts.
I have no idea how you avoid those kinds of issues. I don't think there is a solution, because no social network has solved this at scale. In terms of Lemmy, though, consolidation is absolutely required because many communities are dead.