cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7214793
Hello again!
So we, the food and cooking community mods, have been discussing merging a few of the communities together. We’re pretty fractured at the moment and we don’t really have the userbase to support so many niche communities so we’re looking at merging some. We previously pinned a post asking users to cross-post to relevant communities and some of the feedback we received is some don’t like this as it can clutter their feeds. Also there were many suggestions of merging until we get more growth and can support more nice communities.
So the plan would be to merge !askculinary, !bbq, !cooking, !food, and !recipes. This would combine a lot of the more general food communities into one and hopefully we reduce cross posting as well as grow users and content. Later, if we have a larger userbase that can support more niche communities, we can spin them off again. So, before moving forward with the merge, we wanted to make sure you all are aware of the plans as well as get some feedback on this decision. So please let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!
EDIT: To explain how this would work, we have a couple options:
Lock all the niche communities and leave a pinned post pointing to the main Food community. Later we may reopen them once the userbase grows to support them.
Leave all communities open and cross post from the niche communities to the main one. So when you post a recipe to [email protected], it would get crossposted to [email protected]. [email protected] would be a catch all if you wanted the “fire hose” approach. Or you can sub to the niche communities you want.
When the rush happened from redditors joining Lemmy, they basically went and remade every single subreddit, not once on a single instance, but many many times over many instances. This is a problem, because now we have a ton of dead spaces across the federation that are useless.
I am for merging, because the userbase is too small to sustain multiple niche communities. Lock 'em up, boys!
Thank you for your comment.
This is exactly the reason why we’re exploring these options. We’re still somewhat trying find out how we want grow and form the cooking communities as a whole hence why we’re asking for community feedback.
It’ll grow over time as the Lemmy userbase grows. It’s not like people are cooking less, if anything we’re cooking more given the amount of knowledge available on the internet allowing us to do crazy creations we never thought of ourselves.
Since the pandemic I’ve gotten a lot more into cooking and baking, and it’s mostly with the help of guides and stuff from the internet.
I would make it mandatory to share the recipe, personally. That’s my growth driver; providing value.
It’ll grow over time as the Lemmy userbase grows.
This is true, but what we’re seeing is lack of content which doesn’t entice people to sub and slows down growth. The idea is that if we can get more people posting and more content, more people will want to sub and then hopefully more people will post and we can get to a point where all the communities can serve their own niches and thrive.
I hate duplicate posts. I support a merge.
There should be a native crosspost feature allowing users to crosspost to other communities but instead of creating a new instance of the post, it’s a link back to the original instance of the post.
Agree with merging. We could use tags in post titles (e.g. [Recipe], [BBQ], [Ask], etc) so we can easily pick out those that interest us, and also allow us to see if a particular subtopic is gaining more popularity.
This is something we have been discussing doing and I think it will help greatly with organization. Hopefully Lemmy integrates tagging at some point.
I’m mostly in favor of option one, but I am concerned that it could result in a cesspool filled with memes.
Without a good way to filter out memes, large communities that permit them can easily become unusable.
We definitely don’t want the community to be overcome with memes and while we don’t want to disallow memes all together, we actively monitor the communities for proper content. We want these communities to be about actually discussing food/cooking and helping eachother out mostly but having fun and laughing is very much a part of enjoying food, IMO. So memes will be allowed, but if it gets out of hand, we will make sure to let everyone know and discuss where to go from there.
i agree with the merge, BUT, don’t do it on the biggest instance, so it slow the impact of DDOS here on lemmy
Copying my reply from the c/food community here for visibility
I am for a merge. It worked well for my communities to merge (PlayStation and PS5) and I think it will be successful here also. I chose to keep my PS5 community open, but since you are dealing with merging multiple communities it might be good to lock them with a pinned post for at least a little while.
Once the dust settles I think opening them back up (but keeping the pinned post) would be a good option to give the choice back to the community for those that eventually wish to splinter off.
I read your comment on there as well, you bring up a good point. We’re trying to grow to the best of our abilities, but leave it up to the people as to what they want to see. This is what makes us a bit hesitant so lock up any community
I left it open, and posted reminders through a roughly 1 week period. Some people don’t visit communities directly, so pinned threads get missed. This way people see it in their feeds and you can account for a few different time zones.
I support the merge for now, but I’d want there to be a plan in place to reopen them at some point if/when there is enough of a user base to support them
Ideally those communities do serve different niches even though there’s a lot of overlap and it would be kind of a shame if we reach a point where there’s enough of a community ready to use them but they’re stuck with the community locked up
This is definitely the plan for sure. Whether we lock or leave open the niche communities, we don’t want them gone forever. This merge is just something we’re looking at to help encourage more posts and content in general, which hopefully will give people more reason to sub, and then once the userbase is enough to support, those niche communities can thrive. Locking those communities, if we go that route, is always meant to be temporary.
Ngl I do kinda like option 1 to prevent a bunch of duplicate posts in the feed, but if thats the choice we should have some kind of parameter for when reopening would be appropriate. Like a yearly check in post, or a total sub size, or something.
Good idea! This is why we don’t to do anything without community feedback
I have no idea what the mod tools and such are like on Lemmy, so I don’t know how feasible it is, but I feel like a good way to do it would be to enforce tagging posts, and once we hit a certain threshold of users using that tag the relevant community gets reopened
Making up numbers on the fly, but maybe something like after 100 different users have made posts with a certain tag and at least 10 of them have made at least 5 posts the relevant community gets reopened, and the main cooking community makes a stickied post and makes some automod comments or something advertising that it’s back open.
A lot of online communities get a lot of their content from a handful of power-users, so making sure that you have a handful of people who are repeatedly making relevant content I think is just as important as making sure you have bulk people who may only contribute occasionally, which is why I included having some users who have made multiple posts
Also when that critical mass is reached, some strategic timing for when to reopen them may be a good idea. Might get some extra buzz and activity to kick things off by reopening BBQ a couple weeks before memorial day when people are getting ready for summer cookouts and ask culinary around November as people are starting to plan for thanksgiving and Christmas
Agreed, Lemmy just doesn’t have enough users yet to fracture things as much as we did on reddit
I recently subscribed to all of them and I agree a merger would be best. I think sticky-redirects is the best course of action until splitting again to the original config, should Lemmy experience more growth in the food subs.
I think Cooking or Food make the most sense as defaults. I personally like Cooking better.
Thank you for your comment.
Absolutely merge. I wish more communities would do this, it would make lemmy so much better.
I think it’s a good idea to merge the smaller communities into a larger one in order to improve engagement, interest, growth etc. There just isn’t enough content per small community.
Thank you for your feedback
Merge into !food and define thresholds when you will reopen niche communities
Defining a clear threshold will be difficult, but we will defnitely keep making sure we keep in touch with the community on this.
I have posted here, and the top comments were from people who only commented (and contribute no OC) that it looked bad despite the posts being about technique/ ingredients. If everything needs to be Foodporn I’m out.
That won’t be the case. At minimum there would be a !foodporn and a !cooking community.
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