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.
I think the reason that consolidation approach hasn't been implemented is that it would lead to discussion of one subject drowning out discussion of the other subjects. If they consolidated Marxism and Anarchism into only one Theory comm, since most of the users here are Marxist it would lead to Anarchists having difficulty in finding discussion of Anarchist theory. Same thing for the religion comms, there's far more Christian users than any other religion so a consolidated comm would just end up looking like an alias of the current Christianity comm. Then consider what would happen if an unwitting user posted about a niche subject in these comms that have, for months and months, only been used for the "hegemonic" subject so to speak; they'd probably be ignored.
This would be a concern but with the comms in question, there is barely any activity at all. We have more Marxists than Anarchists, yes, but the comm activity levels are pretty similar. c/marxism is bigger but not by much. And a c/theory, which is being proposed, would add other tendencies to further even things out.
And this is even more true for religious comms. Despite most users having a Christian upbringing, c/christianity has barely any users, because people here just aren’t religious in general, nor interested in specific Christian history or theology. And all this is even truer for the other religious comms.
I’m suggesting this consolidation approach only because I’m confident what you speak of will not happen. The comms just aren’t popular, even the ones that, at first glance, seem like they should be.
The purpose would be to bring more users to the comms though, no? So if the solution is successful, that drowning out effect would still happen. It probably is still worth trying since worst case scenario we go from several inactive comms and one slightly active comm to a single, more active comm.
In the cases I’m proposing, the drowning effect would also be mitigated by the fact that we aren’t combining one popular + one unpopular comm, but one popular (relatively) + many less popular ones. The combined posting from the latter would offer a greater counterweight to the bigger comm than just merging two comms.