I am wondering at the moment how to handle the different communities on the various instances that are covering the same topic: For example there is a technology community on nearly every instance. If I now want to create a post, do I just post this to one instance to avoid spam (I think most users are subscribed to multiple technology communities like myself) or is it better to post it to multiple instances to create more content and also support smaller instances?
At the moment I lean towards only posting to one instance, because I think there is no way to hide/ignore a post in the feed, when it shows up multiple times.
What do you guys think?
I think the community duplication is fine to an extent, people will begin to gravitate to the communities that have more activity and better moderation. If for example [email protected] moderation became subpar, people might flee to [email protected].
Yeah there is some fragmentation right now, but people learn quickly. They post to one, don’t get any replies, then post to another one that has more users and activity and get more replies so they keep posting there, and eventually that community ends up being the default.
Even on reddit there was some fragmentation of subreddits usually because of different moderator influences. How many “True” whatever subs did you see on reddit? That was all because the original subreddit ended up having some kind of controversy or disagreement and people split off and made a new one. In fact the reason you may not have seen it more on reddit is because you weren’t necessarily aware of alternative subreddits. If you were using r/gaming obviously the moderators aren’t going to tell you that there is an r/truegaming but at least in the fediverse you’re already kind of forced to be aware that there’s often alternative/duplicated communities so in the back of your mind you can kind of be like “eh I don’t really like the moderators on here, let me see if [email protected] is better”.
I like this approach. Only downside I see is, that it makes communities on smaller instances kind of irrelevant unless they are specializing on a more exotic view on a subject (maybe a conservative take in politics vs a progressive view). Is this not creating a big concentration of „relevant“/big communities on the big instances? I get the feeling any @lemmy.ml or @beehaw.org are on a good way to be the standard/go to instances for communities.
They’re not irrelevant, they’re just small.
There used to be a thoduand different, I don’t know, Sailor Moon forums out there. Some where small, some were big. Some may have been inactive, but I promise you that the small actives ones were not insignificant to the people who used them, and the people who used them did so for reasons beyond not knowing the big ones existed.
There’s zero reason for everyone to be in the same place. It doesn’t provide a benefit. It just silences the voice in the back of some people’s minds that tells them they might be missing out on something because it’s somewhere else.
Different instances are different communities. Different communities have different things to day about different topics. Let them have their spaces. It’s not like they don’t have direct and immediate access to the “big” forums here, if they have anything they want to share there.
Nice point of view, thanks for sharing. I think I viewed things more from a Reddit point of view, where most subs are so big that real interactions in my experience are not that common because everything moves kind of quickly. So I mostly used it as a link aggregator (kind of like an rss feed). If viewed as a Forum, I kind of like the idea of smaller separate (but accessible)communities. I only have to get used to it a bit.