I agree, I would never subscribe to such a specific community, and the decentralization, to my eye, leads to less user engagement; if one of these link posts don’t have comments, I’m less inclined to even click on it in the first place.
Comment on Link to Dan Da Dan Episode 2 Discussion
ReluctantZen@feddit.nl 5 weeks ago
Is it mandatory to do these discussions in the specific communities? The annoying thing about these anime specific communities, is that they always show up completely empty for me. I’m guessing because no one from my instance has subscribed to it, but it’s still not a great experience and I don’t really want to subscribe to those communities just for when it’s airing and then unsubscribe later to prevent clogging up my feed and subscriptions.
bread@feddit.nl 5 weeks ago
wjs018@ani.social 5 weeks ago
You are correct in that the lack of posts for your instance would be because nobody on your instance has subscribed. The first time that somebody on your instance searches the community, it will fetch the most recent 20 (iirc) posts and pull them in, but without comments or votes. Unfortunate side effects of how federation is implemented in lemmy… Once there is a user subbed to a community on your instance, everything from that point forward will federate over as normal. I am sorry that these kinds of federation quirks are impacting you this way! I also wish that I could create an instance-agnostic url to point this post at, but unfortunately that is also not possible within lemmy. Instead, I have to settle for using the instance-agnostic community links in the post body.
The rationale for letting show-specific communities host their own discussion threads is to help introduce those communities to a wider audience in the fediverse. The lemmy and lemmy-compatible userbase is small enough that splitting across threads/communities seemed counter-productive.
I think it is a fair criticism to say that doing it this way is dumb. At the end of the day, I opted against centralizing all the discussions to this community to allow for smaller communities to try and grow/earn users. However, that is a judgement call I made, and I am far from infallible. I am open to other users telling me that this isn’t how this should work as well.
I do want to reassure you and others that if a community-run series like this is overly late or stops making the threads, then I am more than willing to reassume creating the posts in this community, and it is something that I keep track of on my end.
ReluctantZen@feddit.nl 5 weeks ago
I see where you’re coming from, but I think this rationale makes more sense for centralized platforms like Reddit, where federation isn’t an issue. I wonder how effective it is, seeing as it’s very easy to conclude that the community is inactive or dead if you’re from another instance and only see (bot)posts without any comments or upvotes. That’s what I thought for a while anyway with many of these anime specific communities, like with Delicious in Dungeon. (Off topic, but these federation complications are also one of the reasons why I don’t think decentralized platforms are the be-all-end-all like many seem to think. It’s very user-unfriendly)
Good to hear. Thanks for the response.