Right now on Lemmy we have a bunch of dad-based communities with varying levels of discussion. From the ones I can find, we have:
!dadworld@lemmy.world - last few posts were about a month ago. Mod was last active 10 months ago.
!daddit@kbin.social - last couple posts were about 2 months ago. The post before that was about 5 months ago. Not sure about mod activity.
!dads@feddit.uk - last post was yesterday, with some other posts in past few weeks. Mod was last active 6 months ago.
!dadsonly@lemmy.world - last post was a few weeks ago, with a couple months in between posts after that. Mod was last active 10 months ago.
!dadsplain@lemmy.ca - last couple posts were a week ago. With about a month or so between posts after that. Both mods were last active a year ago.
!dadvice@lemmy.world - last post was 3 months ago. Mod was last active 2 months ago.
!fatherverse@midwest.social - last post was about a month ago, and the one before that was about 4 months ago. Mod was last active today.
To help facilitate discussion, what do you all think about consolidating the dad-based discussion to one of those groups (preferably a somewhat moderated one, which just seems to be fatherverse…) for now?
Consolidating communities defeats part of the purpose of federation and decentralization.
Having the community on an instance other than lemmy.world and lemmy.ml is decentralizing.
The other parameter is that with 50k monthly active users, there is only so much activity on a specific topic.
Having it spread over 7 communities kills activity rather than keeping 1 community alive.
Encourage cross posting. The function is viable, and when it’s used, it not only improves each community individually, it keeps awareness of other options.
The only thing “killing activity” is people nodding being unaware of cross posting existing and/or using it.
Crossposts don’t aggregate comments. If you ask “How was your father’s day” on 7 dad communities, you are going to split the answers across the 7 communities.
Comments don’t need aggregation.
Look, we obviously have a difference in philosophy of the fediverse here.
So, let me back up a second and explain that.
The fediverse should be about communities being disparate. No single instance, no single mod or admin owning an idea, or the consequent community that forms around an idea. Part of why reddit became so horrible was the inability to have a viable alternative community around a subject when one went off the rails because someone had total control over a word, like “parenting”, or “knives” or “gaming”.
The more you consolidate communities, the more you give fewer entities control of a idea/concept/subject.
Comment aggregation is nice, if all you want is a single feed to scroll through, but the price of it is too high.