So, I love this site. I've been here more-or-less since the beginning, across various accounts. I also have accounts on other Lemmy instances.
One common pattern I see is that instances branch out their communities too soon, and overly dilute the conversation. It makes an instance that is ultimately not that active (compared to any of the big sites that don't need naming, really) appear to be even less lively, due to so many instances with either nothing at all, a few month old posts, or a generic post linking to a projects blog.
Note that I am not criticizing the instance by pointing out the low activity levels - I really do love this place. It's just a fact at the moment. You can switch viewing posts by new and scroll down a little to see we get around 5 - 6 posts per hour, occasionally a bit more and occasionally a bit less.
I think that having lots of inactive, dead looking communities is off-putting. I know that I certainly don't feel encouraged to post in them. I worry this might have a similar effect on other users too.
I do understand that c/programming is deemed as something of a catch-all community, and so anyone could post there rather than the niche communities, but I'm not sure that this is totally obvious to everyone.
Personally, I feel we should purge all the tiny communities that have no posts (or just a single blog post, for example) and encourage people to post in c/programming. Then, new communities can be made when a particular topic becomes large enough to warrant divergence, either because it's clearly a subject of interest to many users or because it ends up dominating c/programming. c/rust is an example of such a community, as is c/programmerhumor.
I am nobody here, and I was not asked for my opinion, but I just wonder if this topic has been thought about much? I really want this place to thrive. Do any other users here have an opinion? What do the instance admins think?
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 tried the system with people interested in running it with the request system, it didnt work and people didnt actually boost things
Mac is my posting account. I can start crossposting a bunch of stuff I post on it into the general communities if the specific things have less than 100 active users and do some more discussion posts
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.
Growth over time and SEO
It gets a bunch of activity in the larger community while letting the smaller communities grow. People havent been crossposting currently so it hasnt been happening but I can encourage it more
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
Okay, well if you are confident it's working, then great. Presumably then, you don't see that there are any issues with over-dilution?