The recent Mod Drive/Comm Creation brought to my attention how many comms barely get used. Some don’t have any users at all. It’s a problem I remember speaking out about way back in the day and it’s still here. There are a few reasons I think can of.
Firstly, we just don’t have enough users to fill in every niche comm. It’s been a problem for a while and the only solution is the grow, especially focusing on the kinds of users that would populate those comms.
Secondly, and more importantly, when a potential post can be created in two or more comms, users tend to choose the one with more activity. So, if a post can be put under c/Islam or c/History, people tend to choose c/History. This is a basic flaw in the Reddit/Lemmy style of posting.
And with these two problems combined together, the small comms face a near-insurmountable obstacle. Creating new comms won’t change that. I’m not against new comms. New comms are good. But, in addition, there needs to be other measures taken, to ensure this doesn’t just result in more dead comms.
One solution is to look at combining some of these smaller comms into ones that can represent a bigger percentage of the user base. For example, the four religious comms - c/paganism, c/islam, c/judaism, and c/christianity - can be combined into a c/religion instead. This would have two benefits.
Firstly, it would have a bigger user base. Right now only c/christianity has more than 1 user per month. Most users just don’t join these comms, because they feel they are not a part of that religion. Again, if we had a big enough user base, with enough people of those religions there to fill them, this wouldn’t be a problem. As it stands, though, this results in dead comms. A c/religion would solve this by providing a central location for all religious discussion, making it appealing to people of certain religions and to people who are interested in religious content.
Secondly, this also solves the issue of there not being a c/shinto or c/buddhism or c/hinduism. There is no logical reason why these, and countless others, don’t exist when the four we have do. This means posts about religions other than the four get posted on comms like c/history or c/news or wherever. A central c/religion would provide a location for all religious content, saving us from creating even more dead comms for every major religion out there.
Another example. Right now we have a c/europe, c/oceania and c/latam, with c/mena being proposed. As far as continents go, this is a pretty awful spread. With a bigger userbase, it would make sense for us to have not just these, but also c/asia and c/africa. The purpose of these separate comms was for that to be the case. But the result is dead comms (except for c/latam) and once again no place for other posts about asia or africa except on c/news or c/politics etc.
One solution is the combining of these comms into something like a c/tricon representing the three continents - Asia, Africa and America. It is also a reference to the Tricontinental Conference held in Cuba in the 1960s, which was a major gathering of ex/colonised countries to overthrow colonialism, imperialism and capitalism.
The goal of the Tricontinental Conference was to merge Afro-Asian solidarity with Latin American solidarity and to develop a communist organization with the goal of international revolution. It was one of the largest gatherings of anti-imperialists in the world.
Pretty cool.
What happens to Europe and Oceania? Well, imo these are both just parts of Asia anyway. But if we want, we could create a separate c/colonisers for them and other settler-colonial states. This would also remove c/canada.
Just a thought.
The suggestion of a c/theory is a good one, but it can also be used to consolidate c/marxism and c/anarchism, in addition to providing a place for other leftist theories.
There are many other possibilities, that we can think of if this is an idea worth pursuing. Anyway, these are my thoughts.
While it’s fine for comms to fail, I don’t think we should be doing things that actively encourage it. This is the unintended consequence of the way we create comms.
For example, with religion comms - we created a c/christianity because some users wanted it. It got some activity. Now, though the question arose of what to do about other religions? So we created c/islam and c/judaism. But why stop there? Why not also create c/buddhism, c/hinduism, and many, many others? Clearly, if followed through, we would need at least a dozen (inc. c/paganism, c/animism etc.) And almost all of them would be dead on arrival, or near enough.
But what if we had a different approach to comm creation? What if, when the idea arose of a c/christianity, we instead said, “Let’s think a bit more broadly,” and create a c/religion?
I don’t think it would be a major comm, but it would definitely be way more active than c/christianity or any of the other comms individually, and also more active than them combined, because c/religion could cover so many more religions and it could cover the topic of religion itself.
I agree, it’s fine for comms to fail. But if there is a way to ensure they do not, then I think we should try it.
This is why I think a culture of expectation that comm creators actually post daily to their comms is good.
One of the main reasons these spaces sometimes fail is simply because they do not have someone posting in them. Over on reddit almost all subreddits that grow are initially started by one person who doggedly provides content in them as the main poster up until they grow large enough for a community of people to exist as other contributors.
Prior to recent drama Reddit incentivised this because it felt like you "owned" the space, so it was yours, so putting in the effort to grow it existed.
If we're going to keep comms as a request thing (instead of just opening it up for people to "own" them and for some people to put the effort in vs others that do not) then creating the expectation and culture of creators being a daily poster in their communities is the way to fill this gap.
Afterall, almost all of these comms WOULD have activity if someone posted to them. Others would absolutely comment on those posts. What you get from this state-mandated-posting approach is a simple method of making sure they have activity, solving the "please put the effort in" issue, and a signal that can be used for passing the space into someone else's care or winding them down.
Yeah, this is a good idea. IMO, we can marry the two approaches, too. Consolidate some and mandate posting on them. A c/religion would have more people willing to daily post/comment than one specifically about c/Islam for example, because I don’t think even Daily Islam Posting would make them super popular, but seeing someone post about their religion of choice might make someone else post about another one.
It's not so much about making the spaces popular but simply making sure they are active so that when people who will use them come along don't see an inactive space. People will subscribe to a comm if it is getting content, they won't subscribe to a comm that is not.
The correct way to look at subreddits (and by extension, comms) is that they are twitter feeds that many people contribute to instead of 1. Initially they all start with 1, who provides the value to become a subscriber to that content. Eventually more find and contribute to the space but not without that 1 person doing the daily post providing value in being a subscriber.
Once you establish in your mind that subreddits are collectively contributed to twitter feeds the whole concept of posting once per day to them as the primary growth tool makes a lot more sense.
Yes, I’m not against your idea. I even mentioned the thing about growth as the first point in my post. But we don’t need to do one or the other, when we can do both. Everything you said applies to combined comms, I’d argue even more so, as more people will be willing to daily and semi-daily post. We don’t have to combine everything either.