You Should Know
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
view the rest of the comments
I blame unfederated subscriber counts. If you look up any community from an account on lemmy.world and there is a local version and a remote version... the local version LOOKS bigger when it's about half the size because the remote version only shows subscribers from lemmy.world whereas the local version shows subs fediverse-wide.
If sub counts were apples to apples for remote and local communities, people would much more frequently sub to the bigger remote comminity. But lemmy.world is so big, that when people are subbing locally because they're confused about which is bigger... the lemmy.world community actually becomes bigger very quickly. So it's winning the community scaling races consistently on pure confusion. The resulting community centralization is not all that healthy and they often overtake better run and more established communities for no meaningful reason.
I'm with you on all points
How can one avoid this "trap?"
As an individual?
Lemmy.worldrecently became the largest for its topic in the most recent user-signup wave while effectively being unmoderated. It overtook an older, more established, and better run community on another instance and it's too late for accurate size-metrics to help anyone understand the difference between these communities now. You have to look at mod activity to see that one mod team solicited community feedback on rules, enforced them fairly, set up raceday discussion threads, and had fruitful policy discussions and calm disagreements with subscribers. The other was absent for days at a time, ignored mentions, didn't set up rules, ignored conflicts between users, the showed up to remove posts trying to jumpstart policy discussions, and basically was AWOL until some users of the community petitioned the admins to take over the community. It's probably going to head in a better direction now that there are finally more mods on board, but its dominant growth phase occured while an absent mod was squatting it and doing nothing much of use, the only thing that mattered was being onlemmy.worldwith misleading subscriber counts and that was enough to become what is now genuinely the biggest community for its topic.As the threadiverse overall, I think community discovery within Lemmy just has to be a lot better. I'm not sure what that looks like in its entirety, but I'm confident that a critical piece of the experience is comparable activity metrics for local and remote communities being prominent in Lemmy's native community browser.
Thanks for the detailed answer!