Comment on Does programming.dev have a dilution problem due to too many communities?
Ategon@programming.dev 9 months ago
We switched up how we handle communities a couple times. We didnt start expanding horizontally until the main communities seemed stable and had some good activity (community creation was open publicly starting last month and before that there was the request zone). The posting activity is the same as it was in the previous systems
The ones that are visible in new are empty mostly because they were just made. The ones made by me and that are now handled by the vacant account are ones that have sources I can add to my rss reader and then post consistently. For example the elm community has weekly posts on things going on in the ecosystem. This means they wont be dead and should have a solid stream of posts as it builds up active users.
The most commonly used sorts in the instance are subscribed sort and local sort. If something is posted in one of the smaller communities people will interact with it in local sort.
idlebones@programming.dev 9 months ago
I understand. Do you think that making 100 communities “to start collecting people” is a bit counterintuitive, though? Just a quick browse through shows that the majority of these coms (including ones made much longer ago) are just dead. A lot of them have moderators that haven’t shown signs of activities in months, and the only posts are the RSS style feed dumps, with little sign of discussion. Would it not make more sense to just let people make communities who are interested in actually running the community? Including starting discussions, advertising the community, sharing interesting content within it, etc.
Please don’t take that as a criticism. I see that you do a lot around here, and I really appreciate your efforts. I’m just concerned that this mass dilution may hinder a lot more than it helps.
Even looking at some of the larger coms, like !gamedev@programming.dev, haven’t had activity in over 10 days. In my opinion, that makes it feel unappealing as a place to go and discuss and share things about that topic.
The 5-6 posts per hour I mentioned is a little disingenuous, too. Looking through it, half of those are a single user (Mac), who is just going through these empty communities and posting links to the project’s news feed.
Do you not think there would be some merit in having fewer, but more condensed and livelier communities?
I may well be wrong, I am certainly no expert in creating or running something like this. I am just drawing from the experience I’ve seen of places like old Reddit (back when it started) growing. They didn’t let anyone make subs until around two years in, at which point they had reached a critical mass of users that meant fracturing into subreddits didn’t leave the whole site feeling thin.
Ategon@programming.dev 9 months ago
I think the better option rather than condense things into less communities is to crosspost things between the larger communities and the smaller communities and make the larger communities more apparent to funnel people into them
We also are ultimately a link aggregator in addition to a forum
idlebones@programming.dev 9 months ago
May I ask, why do you think that is the better option? I understand people didn’t boost things when they were requesting communities, but are they boosting now?
I’m not certain that cross-posting a bunch of stuff and dumping project newsfeeds into communities is going to kickstart them much. I don’t think that can work with you doing it alone across so many communities. You need someone who is really keen on growing the community to be doing it, and if that someone isn’t around - I’d argue the community may not need to exist (until someone does arrive and wants to do that).
Again, this is your instance and it’s not my business how you run it, so feel free to tell me to mind my own business.
Ategon@programming.dev 9 months ago
Growth over time
I mean we are a link aggregator. It aggregates links into the communities for people to view. Its been working so far and ive managed to boost a bunch of communities to have a larger amount of active users/month (the last community on page 1 now has 42 users/month rather than before it was 10 users/month at the end of page 1