Hi all!

Do we need a /c/news and/or /c/politics?

I know it's kinda confusing. After all, where else have you been getting local news and politics all this time? But those communities are actually /c/localnews and /c/tucsonpolitics.

So here's the dillemma - we get far more engagement on national-level news. Yet that's technically against the rules here.

So what should we do?

Should we open up new communities for national level discourse?

I think I floated the idea before but the community was generally against it at the time.

Many of the people engaging are Tucsonans operating from other instances, which I think is super cool and shows that there is value in people having a local forum to discuss national news and politics.

On the future of tucson.social:

I think the future lies with Mbin, not Lemmy.

For those who aren't a complete FOSS nerd like me - Mbin is a fork of Kbin that, in their own words:

Mbin is focused on what the community wants, pull requests can be merged by any repo owner (with merge rights in GitHub). Discussions take place on Matrix then consensus has to be reached by the community. If approved by the community, only one approval on the PR is required by one of the Mbin maintainers. It's built entirely on trust.

In short - it's moving faster than Kbin ever was in feature contributions and has even overtaken Lemmy in terms of daily merges. I expect that it could be the dominant "threadiverse" platform in a few years and I think that's where tucson.social will need to be.

Right now that's unfeasible, since that would mean essentially abandoning the instance and starting fresh, so I'm looking into ways to migrate everything over - so everyone isn't required to sign up again.

Then there's the mobile client compatibility. Perhaps Mbin will have a lemmy compatible API layer somewhere in the future. Perhaps mobile clients will catch up. Either way, that also requires more time.

Suffice it to say, tucson.social isn't moving to Mbin anytime this year, or even early next year. In the meantime, I'll probably try to reason out my own lemmy>mbin migration script to speed things along.

So what say you, tucson.social users/contributors?

TL;DR - Do we need communities for national level discourse here at tucson.social? Also, we're planning to eventually move to Mbin and I'm keeping folks informed about those plans.