Maybe lemmy.world would have been less dominant if people had to use/start other instances to create communities.

AFAIK the dev-site Lemmy.ML came first, with the message that ‘anyone can run their own Lemmy instance, and run it as they like!’ and that got the ball rolling, with the consequences to follow. The genie was out of the bottle at that point, and PieFed’s later approach is arguably the most practical way to deal with the fallout (in terms of dead communities).

maybe if Lemmy supports it then people could start deleting old communities.

I dunno about that. I can see an argument that the dead community is worth keeping if it has useful content. Who knows if the migrated sub won’t go dead itself, or its instance eventually goes dead, meaning that it’s better to hold the material somewhere.

To me this kinda gets back to the idea that there’s no guarantee that any individual sub or site will last indefinitely across the FV. It’s mostly all user-supported hobbyism, and individuals will always be dropping in and dropping out. Reddit again has a huge advantage in permanency there, since it’s profit-driven and became huge.

So the FV tools to migrate are especially important as I see it. To hop from one lily pad to another as old leaves inevitably sink…

I’m not sure we are talking about the same thing. This is what to call a community/sublemmy/magazine (thanks for the reminder @Kierunkowy74@kbin.social), correct? I think 1 universal term for the threadiverse would be more efficient, but I really don’t care.

Yeah, I’m kinda lost, myself. The internal terms for “community” (and equivalents) aren’t going to change, so I’m only talking about how to best understand what they are.

I do expect “sub-” anything is probably going to be a tough sell, with push back coming from anti-Reddit users.

Personally, I’m not trying to push any particular term on anyone. I use “SubLemmy”, “SubPie”, “comm” and “/c” because they feel more natural / appropriate, that’s all. If that kind of usage picks up with others, then I might just wind up reverting to “sub” because it’s easier and already well-known from Reddit.

I don’t know that anti-Reddit users would have a problem with “sub.” I’m thinking most of them very much liked the overall Reddit format and terminology, but they left because of shitty administration, moderation, and stuff like that. In reality, I bet most of us wish that the Fediverse was more robust with features like Reddit, but with less draconian management.

“That’s some mouse!”

I actually feel like it would’ve been better if the creation of communities was limited only to admins for the first couple of years of Lemmy. I believe that’s how Reddit started out, with very few communities.

Ah wow, I did not know that. Yeah, I imagine that would have been very helpful on the bigger instances. Maybe allow for a certain amount of communities to be created each month, with people needing to petition for those slots, showing the admins how invested and how much work they were willing to put in. Something like that.

Only problem, that’s easier said than done when anyone at all can start up an instance, and they’ve all been kind of jockeying for position since the beginning. And they all have their individual philosophies, too. Reddit being a unified thing really had an advantage there, I think.

I wish there was a good way to clean up the old dead communities and migrate their posts and subscribers to alternative communities.

When Lemm.ee died, that’s exactly why I switched to PieFed. Because PieFed did just that with my own community.

Can you expand on “a certain amount of content is best dribbled to them”? I’m having trouble following what you mean.

Oh, I mean that simply an interesting picture, thought or link can be enough for a post. For example, if I have a dozen post-worthy images along the same theme, they don’t need to all be uploaded to Imgur or PixelFed, then collected in to a single post. Instead, they can be dribbled in to twelve different posts over time. Because it’s primarily a casual, doom-scrolling audience, so it’s probably better for one’s sanity to err on the side of casualness when posting. Also, it helps prevent burnout.

That being said I think any replacement would need to be universal and not software dependent…

I don’t think that’s practical. Just a frank, warts-'n-all description of the standard FV community in the theoretical guide to help community-starters avoid possible delusions.

What are talking heads and mutual help in regards to forums?

My experience with forums is that you tend to bump in to the same people a lot, making it more of a true community experience. People who are friendly in those situations often wind up learning about each other and helping each other out when possible.

With the Reddit model, it’s more like strangers dropping in and dropping out all day long, day after day, so it seems much rarer to see the same people, learn about them, and build much sense of community in that sense. It’s more of a hive mind IME. Even a single conversion is commonly a chain of multiple people keeping the conversation going, even though at first glance it just seems like two people chatting. I found that pretty weird at first, but it eventually became normal for me.

improvements and suggestions are always welcome. Do you have any that could go into a guide like you suggest or additions to the sidebar?

Yes. I’m thinking they should go in to a working guide, and that should be linked in the sidebar. And of course we’d need a dedicated maintainer(s) of such a guide.

As for suggestions, a good place to start might be in understanding just who the Fediverse audience is. Demographics, peak activity times, device used (like desktop vs. mobile), browser vs app, browsing style, and whatever else relevant.

As for browsing style, I’m thinking most users are of the dopamine-based surfing style, and therefore a certain amount of content is best dribbled to them, not collected in to posts over-much. (I used to have that problem / character in my postings, and sometimes still do, for example in the past I probably would have spent way more time on this one)

Loads of people also love to offer their opinions or jump in to correct or answer something, and those make for popular posts, too. IMO any community would be well-served to design much of their posting style to best-fit their audience with these kinds of considerations… something pretty obvious, but still not always followed through on.

One last thing-- I’ve come to really dislike the word “community” in the FV sense. I’m sure it sounded very social and noble to whoever came up with it, but I think these SubLemmys and SubPies are better understood as a collection of subscribers primarily, many of whom disappear over time. Back when I used WebForums (and even BBS’s) there were indeed many places that developed something of a ‘community’ feel, but things I might expect in those places (the usual avatars, usual talking heads, mutual help) I rarely find here. Now that’s not terrible or anything, but I suspect that some FV community starters begin things with false expectations, and that’s something that a guide might help temper.

Do you have an idea for a new community?

Not to sound too cynical, but IME the issue isn’t with starting a community, it’s in finding ways to make it work successfully and to last. A vastly, vastly harder task, and one which I’d argue needs all the input, discussion and help that it can get.

The Fediverse is already littered with hundreds, or thousands of abandoned communities. But a big, collective guide on ways to make them work could be something of huge value to the project.

There were a lot of modern-looking things millions of years ago. Loads of insects looked very similar. Sharks. Trees and flowering plants. Galliformes (chickens & relatives) were very similar genetically, AFAIK.

Sometimes it’s a case of a lineage evolving relatively little over time, and other cases it could be very different species that just happened to look alike, adapting to a similar environ.

For example, placental mammals and marsupials diverged over 100Myrs ago, and generally looked a lot different from their modern counterparts, and yet they each developed subgroups over time that look remarkably like each other. For rodents, there are marsupials that look remarkably rodent-like, with the same going for cat-like predators.

I love it.

I wonder…

https://www.google.com/search?q=star+trek+devil+in+the+dark+"tunnels"&udm=2

Upvote, but I think what would really help when posting deep or deep-ish research / thought-pieces is to excerpt some telling portion of the article in order to show us what you personally found interesting, as well as to share some key bit of interest from the piece.

Social media streams are so driveby-ish in nature that they’re heavily geared towards a quick look or impression of an image and or bit of text, that merely linking to something will tend to get less engagement (assuming that was the point). Even in a science sublemmy, I would think.

Just my driveby-ish 2¢.

Good comments, yup.

Awesome, thank you for that. <3

Off the top of my head, I think some sort of tutorial or intro to help people get started would do wonders for those curious but intimidated from trying out FV.

Yeah, that’s been bubbling en mi cabeza as well, kinda-recently. I do think the various ‘Join-the-Fediverse’ subs do a good job upon that shizzle IN SPIRIT, but unfortunately, they whiff on much of the downstream, real issues that users encounter.

What to do, what to do…

Now there is certainly much more to say about all of your other observations, but… much of that comes back to a certain reality I’m none too pleased upon, which is roughly this–

Since a vast herd of us are fellow refugees from Reddit & other social media disasters… why aren’t we kinder and more supportive upon each other here, huh…?

So, question-- do you feel like you enjoy the FV as is, or are there things to improve, and if so, what would you suggest…?

(sorry, not trying to put you on the spot, but… I just kinda go for it sometimes, lol)

Wow, that’s a lot more interesting explanation than I was expecting. oO

So you’re Norwegian, is it? English your 2nd language?

By comparison, I definitely don’t mind official French resisting too many loanwords and slang, if only as an A2 French-learner, but… actually that stuff’s probably a joke to most French-speaking non-academics, I suppose.

Okay, trying to sign up now as you’ve got me curious. Looks like the Membership button from the PieFed side works differently now, so we’ll see what happens…

Pre-Germany by a matter of many, many centuries, but I take your point. Also, specifically from an Anglo-Saxon, West Germanic fork that is considerably different from other forks, for example High German as I understand it. Also, English has also been a heavily Norman-French influenced language for almost a full millenium.

So bottom line, one might say that English is an olde French-West Germanic language with a load of influences from Latin, etc, that morphed over time just like most major languages do.

What really is the point in trying to artificially curate it, @vegafjord@slrpnk.net?

Thank you OP for taking 5secs out of your hectic day to construct a useless shitpost demonstrating *exactly* what Rimu just blogged about:

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2282837/open-source-runs-on-good-faith

Привет, «Новая Россия».

Basic mechanism…?

Well, not to beat this topic to death, but earlier today I dug around the PF Help comm and found fairly contradictory results about cross-posting. The one thing I know for sure is that some people can do it on PF, and usually, the option will appear as two arrows circling each other, sort of like a recycling symbol. Just that so far it didn’t appear for me, and it wasn’t clear why. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Then I posted this just a few moments ago…
https://piefed.social/c/lego@lemmy.world/p/2272200/escher-like-waterfall-fountain-with-thousands-of-crystals-by-jarren-harkema

And then BAM, suddenly the symbol showed up for me! Which I immediately pounced upon, cross-posting to the other major LEGO community (on PF.S). I notice that the cross-posting symbol also appears on the 2nd post, too. And yet going back to my own community (on PF.S), my posts still don’t have the symbol on them.

So… in future, guess I’ll just use the feature when it’s available, or link when it’s not. insert 2nd shrug-emoji