I feel like having many communities works well on large platforms, but on smaller ones it fragments the already limited content, which in turn makes most communities inactive and reduces engagement.
Uh, I think it’s the exact other way around. In practice most of the activity already is centralized in more general “melting pot” communities and the lack of engagement is the reason why the content is not distributed across the more specific communities.
Why is this situation not intentionally desirable (on paper)? Well, it kinda misses the whole point of the federation. Lemmy, despite decentralization, is currently more dependent on a few of its communities than the evil corpo social media. Then again, this just proves that technical centralization has always been a lesser issue with the traditional social media services and that activity is where activity is.
I still don’t like the idea of one big general community. I’m certain that a lot of the people here don’t want content just for the sake of content. Being forced to manually filter out most of the content would be a hot mess. On top of that, while activity might increase slightly in quantity, the quality would become even more superficial and shallow. For me personally, it’d be a reason to stop using Lemmy.
We all hate each other.
No, you hate me. I’m blameless. A victim, really.
How dare you, asshole. Always starting shit!
Hey, fuck you, shithead!
Anyway, see you in a thread about mechanical keyboards in five minutes.
And there’s our poor social skills.
Tbh, it feels too me like that is either Lemmy Shitpost or 196. Plus scrolling the front page rather than subscribed
Browse by All (hot or new, your choice), filter out what you don’t want. Can’t do that on reddit anymore.
Exactly. It’s weird to me that anyone doesn’t view posts this way. It’s the default. It shows you everything, and you just block the small number of communities you actively don’t want to see
Really?! Goodness, I guess it was a good thing I got permabanned there last year. That’s utter shit.
The site’s utter shit now, astroturfed to hell and back. Only the hobbyist subs that don’t exist here or aren’t active here are worth going to.
Yeah, I caught wind recently that they eliminated /all.
Not sure the point. There’s already big communities that are fairly active that are more targeted. If I felt like looking at memes, why would I go to a general community instead of a meme community. Or if I wanted news or politics, why wouldn’t I go to one of the large news or politics communities over a general one? Megas within specific communities seem like something that’s only used by a few communities that could be used elsewhere (with the drawback of how /all handles them if you don’t sort by new comments or go directly to the comm).
/all already includes content from all communities, so something posted to c/general is just as likely to be missed my me as stuff posted to a new niche comm. But that latter gives me to option to sub, so I’m more likely to see any future content posted over the next several years. And I might even get motivated to add a post or two, which a post in a general comm would never achieve.
It does? !justpost@lemmy.world and !general@lemmy.world are exactly what you describe. I’m subbed to both, although obviously not everyone is (we can’t force people to read things they don’t want to).
I know reddit used to have a “general” reddit.com page at the beginning, but here it is more like world shitpost where people put whatever.
You may or not have seen recent cross-instance dramas, but that is part of the reason why I think it is better to have a fragmented and decentralized set of instances instead of one melting pot, so that it’s not one set of admins calling the shots on behalf of all of Lemmy.
recent cross-instance dramas
Recent? Drama between instances seems like a constant thing since at least the great reddit exodus. Maybe longer, but I wasn’t here before that.
There was one particular drama I have in mind but I knew as I was writing, but people may come back months later and think the same thing. I still kept it that way as it will still ring true regardless of what the next drama will be.
My #1 guess is that it just wasn’t thought out terribly well. It looks a lot like it was meant to be “Reddit, but with federation”. With that mindset, just having each instance be its own minireddit with its own equivalent of subreddits is pretty intuitive, but it turns out to be really clunky once it’s working. (Hard to find communities and content, dozen different but identically named communities, weird federation behavior)
This being said, nothing’s stopping people from making general/chat/hangout communities, it just takes a lot of work to make a place active and discoverable enough, especially since activity is generally low across the board anyway.
