this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Does programming.dev have a dilution problem due to too many communities? (self.meta)
submitted 9 months ago by idlebones to c/meta
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

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[–] Die4Ever 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] Ategon 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

We switched up how we handle communities a couple times. We didnt start expanding horizontally until the main communities seemed stable and had some good activity (community creation was open publicly starting last month and before that there was the request zone). The posting activity is the same as it was in the previous systems, people just dont want to post and theres the 10% of people comment, 1% of people are posters rule (if its 5-6 posts per hour thats better than the past system as well)

The ones that are visible in new communities are empty mostly because they were just made (~ 100 coms made in the last month). The ones made by me and that are now handled by the vacant account are ones that have sources I can add to my rss reader and then post consistently. For example the elm community has weekly posts on things going on in the ecosystem. This means they wont be dead and should have a solid stream of posts as it builds up active users. Theyre made so they can start collecting people and subs over time rather than attempt to diverge and have nobody know to move over or people not joining at all since they looked for the language by name and didnt find anything (and then I assume people dont want misc changelogs of bug fixes posted to c/programming as well)

The most commonly used sorts in the instance are subscribed sort and local sort. If something is posted in one of the smaller communities people will interact with it in local sort. Crossposting is also highly recommended. I can maybe somehow make that more apparent than it already is

[–] idlebones 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I understand. Do you think that making 100 communities "to start collecting people" is a bit counterintuitive, though? Just a quick browse through shows that the majority of these coms (including ones made much longer ago) are just dead. A lot of them have moderators that haven't shown signs of activities in months, and the only posts are the RSS style feed dumps, with little sign of discussion. Would it not make more sense to just let people make communities who are interested in actually running the community? Including starting discussions, advertising the community, sharing interesting content within it, etc.

Please don't take that as a criticism. I see that you do a lot around here, and I really appreciate your efforts. I'm just concerned that this mass dilution may hinder a lot more than it helps.

Even looking at some of the larger coms, like [email protected], haven't had activity in over 10 days. In my opinion, that makes it feel unappealing as a place to go and discuss and share things about that topic.

The 5-6 posts per hour I mentioned is a little disingenuous, too. Looking through it, half of those are a single user (Mac), who is just going through these empty communities and posting links to the project's news feed.

Do you not think there would be some merit in having fewer, but more condensed and livelier communities?

I may well be wrong, I am certainly no expert in creating or running something like this. I am just drawing from the experience I've seen of places like old Reddit (back when it started) growing. They didn't let anyone make subs until around two years in, at which point they had reached a critical mass of users that meant fracturing into subreddits didn't leave the whole site feeling thin.

[–] Ategon 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I think the better option rather than condense things into less communities is to crosspost things between the larger communities and the smaller communities and make the larger communities more apparent to funnel people into them

We tried the system with people interested in running it with the request system, it didnt work and people didnt actually boost things

Mac is my posting account. I can start crossposting a bunch of stuff I post on it into the general communities if the specific things have less than 100 active users and do some more discussion posts

[–] idlebones 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

May I ask, why do you think that is the better option? I understand people didn't boost things when they were requesting communities, but are they boosting now?

I'm not certain that cross-posting a bunch of stuff and dumping project newsfeeds into communities is going to kickstart them much. I don't think that can work with you doing it alone across so many communities. You need someone who is really keen on growing the community to be doing it, and if that someone isn't around - I'd argue the community may not need to exist (until someone does arrive and wants to do that).

Again, this is your instance and it's not my business how you run it, so feel free to tell me to mind my own business.

[–] Ategon 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Growth over time and SEO

It gets a bunch of activity in the larger community while letting the smaller communities grow. People havent been crossposting currently so it hasnt been happening but I can encourage it more

I mean we are a link aggregator. It aggregates links into the communities for people to view. Its been working so far and ive managed to boost a bunch of communities to have a larger amount of active users/month (the last community on page 1 now has 42 users/month rather than before it was 10 users/month at the end of page 1

[–] idlebones 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Okay, well if you are confident it's working, then great. Presumably then, you don't see that there are any issues with over-dilution?

[–] Ategon 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah no issues as long as theres spots for people to feel comfortable posting in and interacting in regardless of activity elsewhere (which are c/programming and c/no_stupid_questions) and which is then supported by the crossposts

Ill try to do a better onboarding system to guide people that way

Ill ramp up my posting speed, been doing some more setup for things in the admin team for the past bit as well as switching which rss reader I use. Expect more activity in the instance the next week

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Do sites even index Lemmy in SEO? I haven't found a case where a Google search yields a Lemmy thread organically, like it does with Reddit.

[–] Ategon 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah, we just have less content to pull from so people running into it on google happens less often

As a quick example of a community if you search up Concatenative Programming and scroll down a bit youll see programming.dev

[–] SmartmanApps -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I just want to echo the growth over time comment. It's still (relatively) early days of the Fediverse and Lemmy, and we're still on the shallow part of the exponential growth graph. I mod the MAUI Community, which was created shortly before Xmas, and I made some announcements then (like on Mastodon, Daily Dew Drop, etc.) and some people joined then. But then I've also mentioned it again on a few other occasions since when it seemed appropriate (like the other day when I saw a notable dev still posting on Reddit), and each time I do it gains another subscriber or two. We just need to keep advocating each time there's an opportunity. We've built it, and now we just need to wait for them to come. :-) And it's been worthwhile, because when I have an issue I always post both here and on Mastodon, and sometimes I get a solution from Mastodon, but another time I got my solution from someone here (i.e. no-one from Mastodon responded, but someone here did, and the solution worked!). And of course, like Reddit, solutions posted here are easier to find than those posted on Mastodon. I think it's great and just needs some time to grow (as people learn how the Fediverse works and what all the available services are, such as Lemmy instead of Reddit).

[–] lysdexic 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I mod the MAUI Community, which was created shortly before Xmas, and I made some announcements then (like on Mastodon, Daily Dew Drop, etc.) and some people joined then.

I'm late to the game but I should point out that the MAUI community is a textbook example of how communities should definitely not be created, and it was clear from the start that it was already born a dead community.

The C# barely gets a single post per week. The .NET community is even more of a niche community, and in spite of all the non-organic posts it's already dead.

Even though you were fully aware of this and you were repeatedly pointed out the obvious fact that a niche of a niche won't take off, you ignored te feedback and still went ahead with the creation of the community. Which is of course dead.

Lemmy in general and programming.dev in particular already have groups with traction. I hope that moving forward the group creation process is based on peeling specialized topics from existing communities. Otherwise the MAUI fiasco will repeat itself and we'll end up with an even longer tail of dead communities vulnerable to spam and takeovers by bad actors.

[–] SmartmanApps -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

dead communities

None of the communities you have mentioned are dead. In fact according to the January stats, all the communities you mentioned have above average usage.

Noted that you ignored this comment of mine...

it’s been worthwhile

Take your gaslighting somewhere else...

[–] lysdexic 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

None of the communities you have mentioned are dead. In fact according to the January stats, all the communities you mentioned have above average usage.

I'm sorry, you're trying to blatantly lie with statistics.

"Above average" means nothing if the majority of communities is already dead. You're just arguing that some communities are more dead, which is pointless.

You're also lying regarding what traffic is being posted to [email protected]. All posts ranging back to the last two weeks come from a single user account: https://programming.dev/u/SmartmanApps .

To make this even more pathetic, the bulk of the posts going into [email protected] were posted by your account after I pointed out the community was dead and already dead on arrival.

You're not refuting the point: you're proving the point that the community is dead.

[–] SmartmanApps 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I’m sorry, you’re trying to blatantly lie with statistics.

No, you're lying by using a different definition of "dead". See screenshot I already posted. It comes from this very Community. It's based on how many monthly users there are, not how many posts there are. BTW the number of users has gone up since you made your previous comment - the MAUI community now on 35 users a month (only 1 of them is me), which is well on the way to being classified as "moderate" rather than just "quiet". Sorry to break it to you, but you're still wrong. As I said, take your gaslighting elsewhere.

[–] lysdexic 1 points 8 months ago (3 children)

No, you’re lying by using a different definition of “dead”.

Now you're being silly and acting defensively. I don't need to do anything for the [email protected] group to be dead or remain dead, as it was expected to be. Anyone can take a look at it and see that if they filter out your personal inorganic traffic, which is already of dubious relevance, nothing remains.

You can stay up all night arguing otherwise, but it is what it is.

It's ok if you feel that it's your personal mission to generate traffic for a particular channel on a lemmy instance. Just don't try to pretend it's something that's relevant for anyone beyond yourself.

[–] SmartmanApps -1 points 8 months ago

if you feel that it’s your personal mission to generate traffic for a particular channel on a lemmy instance

Oh! One last fact check on your false claims - I don't even post on 1 instance! P.S. take note of the upvotes.

[–] SmartmanApps -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

if they filter out your personal

...it'll still be 35 users/month, which is still not dead.

it’s your personal mission to generate traffic

I'm not generating the other 34 people who used it this month, which includes, as I mentioned before, someone who actually provided me with a solution to a problem I had. Welcome to why Communities are useful. Not sure what purpose you think they're for?

It’s ok if you feel that it’s your personal mission

As opposed to your apparent personal mission of trying to declare groups dead which actually aren't?

Bye now Mr. Gaslighter.

[–] lysdexic 1 points 8 months ago

…it’ll still be 35 users/month

I'm not sure you are aware how irrelevant this is. This could mean as little as a single user opening the community page daily, or 30 different users accidentally navigating into the community page from the main page just because an article showed up in their feed.

To frame the absurdity of this argument, I moderate [email protected] , which in the past month registered also 30 users/month, and that community is also dead.

[–] SmartmanApps -1 points 8 months ago

dead, as it was expected to be

Ah! Now I see why you're attacking - trying to prove you were "right". You weren't, you were wrong.

[–] Toda 4 points 9 months ago

I don't disagree, I do think there are too many communities for the number of active users (both here, and Lemmy in general). What I'd be interested to know is this: Is there some research into the subject, or even a write-up from someone who has successfully grown a thriving community in the past?

I'd argue that with [email protected] being the "default" community, this is somewhat mitigated. It's not policed, so you can post there about Rust, Godot, Python, or whatever you like and nobody will moderate you or ask you to move along. Maybe the "over-dilution", as you call it, hurts the instance as a whole. But if you think of Lemmy as something wider than a single instance, it matters less. [email protected] is the flagship instance here, and it's a large one by Lemmy standards. People will subscribe to that from all over the Fediverse.

So I think it comes down to your view of programming.dev as an instance vs Lemmy as a network of federated communities. Ultimately, people will just subscribe to whatever instances interest them - and hopefully Lemmy as a whole will thrive, including this instance.