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Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

This is unpopular but I’d like to see LESS niche communities. I dont want to see 1000 game communities I want to see one game community where all the people are making threads about the games they like. When its big enough then that game can split into its own community.

Because i may not go out of my way to find a community like guild wars 1 but if I see a post about it in the games community I’d join in. The interest isnt always there it needs to be created sometimes. And it can be created by people seeing threads of interested people talking about their interest.

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Devial@discuss.online ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

And not allowing them kinda sucks for people who want to talk about smaller, less popular games (or niche topics/interests in general), because any posts on an overarching all-games-including community about a small niche indy game is almost certainly just going to get swallowed amongst the flood of posts about other games, and even if there’s people in that community who would’ve engaged with the post, most of them are likely to miss any given post, because they only make up such a tiny fraction of the total members.

For example, I love discussing the Eragon book series, but there’s no Eragon dedicated community on Lemmy, and I don’t really want posts about every other fantasy work ever in my feed, so I don’t really want to subscribe to overarching fantasy book communities.

And sure, if I explicitly feel the urge to talk about it, I can browse a big sub and filter for Eragon content, but this still robs me of the ability to see Eragon Posts Show up in my feed when I’m not explicitly looking for them.

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Cricket@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes, thank you! This is a big mistake that I’ve seen new online communities make since at least the beginning of the internet. I first saw it with the old forums. Start a forum site for subject X, create sub-forums x1 through x57 for every possible subtopic, no matter how minor or niche. Go into most of those subforums, you only hear crickets. To encourage activity, most subjects should be concentrated in few forums at first, until those forums become too busy. Only at that time is it a good idea to split into subforums.

Some Lemmy sites have had the correct idea, where they don’t allow users to create communities. There should be a process where admins manage whether it makes sense to create communities after evaluating requests. Unfortunately, the decentralized nature of Lemmy makes this difficult to control, because as soon as one instance does this, someone wanting to create a new community will just move to another instance that allows it. I’m not sure if there is a solution to this.

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brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
How about community taxonomy?

There’s a gaming community.

Then there’s a simulation game community, and there’s communities in games subdivided into that.

So if you’re in /c/gaming, posts in /c/GuildWars will (optionally) show up in your feed.

If you are in /c/GuildWars, you get the hyper focus, and exposure from your post filtering up to more general tiers.

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- Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah I like that idea its a good solution.
  
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- Cricket@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think this is an awesome idea! It would allow people to have the freedom to create any community they wanted, but still keep posts concentrated enough for visitors to see activity they can participate in. Excellent, maybe you could propose this to the developers of Lemmy and Piefed? Is Mbin still being actively developed?
  
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  - brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ll make an issue in Piefed for sure! Probably Lemmy too.
    
    I’m still thinking some things through for an initial post. For instance, how would moderation work? What level of control do in the ‘higher’ community have over the lower one? Can mods ban posts, or throw the community out entirely? Or are they limited to simply hiding the lower community’s posts a la carte? Should they be able to hide the lower community without banning it?
    
    …And is there any granularity for how that filters down the chain? For example, could /c/MMO be hidden in /c/PCgaming while allowing /c/GuildWars?
    
    How does the integration start? Does it require approval from the “higher” community mods to join a taxonomical hierarchy?
    
    …Can there be multiple parent communities, or max of 1?
    
    And there’s a lot of conflicting incentives there. For instance, you don’t want to give too much power for a spambot or troll to infiltrate a community via a subcommunity.
    
    On the other hand, the fear of power-trippin’ mods may discourage linking under another community, so you want to give the subcommunities sufficient autonomy as well.
    
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    Cricket@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Those are all good questions. I’m inclined to think that keeping this as simple as possible and following similar principles to the existing moderation environment would help make this useful while not creating too much extra work for moderators or admins, as both groups already seem overworked. I think this will already be complicated enough to begin with (for instance, how will communities in other instances be handled?) and fraught with potential for conflicts (for instance, include or not include communities of certain political slants?), so care should be taken to keep this somewhat minimalistic.
    
    With that in mind, here are some possible concepts to consider:
    
    Moderation: following the principle that Lemmy/Piefed allows moderation by users (through blocking users, communities, and instances), community mods (through removing posts and banning users), and instance admins (through overseeing mods and defederating or default blocking other instances), in that order, how about if the users themselves were the first (and perhaps only) ones to decide and control which lower-level communities they want to see structured in their feed and how? It seems to me that community mods should only be able to moderate their own community at each level, and not be able to moderate posts from levels below.
    
    Creation and use of taxonomies: should the creation of the taxonomy be the job of users, community mods, or instance admins? I’m inclined to think that this should also ultimately be left to users to determine, but there could be a mechanism that allows anyone to share/publish a taxonomy that they find useful (or perhaps branches of a taxonomy, like Gaming), and allow other users to either import or subscribe the taxonomy or branches that they like, from a list of different available ones that have been shared/published. Admins could then have the option of setting entire taxonomies or a group of branches as defaults for users of their instances. This would allow users the freedom to create the structure that they would like to see while also allowing others to benefit from that work and not have to duplicate it, and finally also allowing for different competing structures to exist. Community mods could informally ask creators/maintainers of taxonomies or branches to include their communities in that structure. To add communities to a structure, there could be a simple button in each community that said something like “add to structure”.
    
    I think that doing things this way would allow the most freedom, flexibility, and utility, while also minimizing additional work for mods and admins, as well as any potential for conflicts. Another factor to consider would be how much impact would this kind of thing have on resource utilization of instances?
    
    I hope this all makes sense and helps provide some ideas for how this could work.
    
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T156@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As a whole, Lemmy isn’t really big enough to branch out into individual game communities just yet. They just end up petering out.

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IonTempted@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wouldn’t be against it since r/games is used for mainly game announcements and r/gaming is a facebook tier cesspool. I wouldn’t mind a community like that.

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