this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Programming
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If we had a large user base, I would totally see the value, but right now lemmy is still relatively small. Don't you think new content will be too slow? Especially the rust community with around 300 subs for each one.
As I see it perfect is the enemy of the good in this case. Rules, official or unofficial, on the "correct way" to do things stifle growth especially when there's few users. That little extra barrier is enough to keep many people from even bothering at all. You want people to be engaged and excited rather than feeling they're beholden to a bureaucracy. Or worse beholden to an existing group of power users that control things by being the first or the loudest.
That's just the way things work when humans self-organize. There is the appearance of structure at the beginning, because there just aren't that many people with shared interests. Then as people are unsuccessful in finding the community they'd like (assuming they even looked!) more are created. Then more people come in and mill about and browse and get overwhelmed by the search for a needle in a haystack, so they create more.
Eventually, some communities reach a critical mass and a bunch of small ones fade away into near irrelevance or disappear completely.
As far as I know, the only way to put the brakes on community over-proliferation (if that's even a real thing!) is to add a bit of friction to the creation process. Many kinds of friction devolve into centralization and gatekeeping, so they tend to be avoided in projects like this.
The only kind of friction that I can see working and gaining acceptance would be some kind of "have you tried these communities?" auto-search during the creation process. Simply asking people to search first is unproductive for two reasons. First, people are notoriously bad at imagining that someone else might have thought of something first, especially when they are only person they know with that particular interest. (I've only met a dozen other programmers in 43 years. In my entire life (66) I've not met a single person with even a passing interest in boatbuilding, let alone an actual boatbuilder, etc). Second, even if they consider that someone else thought of it first, people are notoriously bad at searching.
Isn't creating a community from scratch already massively discouraging? Who will engage in a small community with barely any content if there's already a bigger one out there? One reason I could think of is there's some reason why the bigger community is not worth being part of any longer, such as bad moderation. In this case, creating a new one seems like the solution.
Honestly, the same kind of thing could be said about Reddit vs Lemmy and the like - Why use a Lemmy instance at all, when something bigger and more popular like Reddit has the (large) communities you want to be a part of?
I am subscribed too them all, there is no limit on how many communities you can subscribe too or cross-post too..