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currently voting is going on in chats on Matrix and Discord (don't ask me why) for the following new communities:
Why would they introduce yet another Linux community?
decentralisation?
Oh well, here we are again at the question if we rather want the fragmentation of similar topics in different locations versus having a more robust decentralized network.
That's one thing I don't think has been fully figured out yet on Lemmy. (Communities on separate servers aggregating similar topics). My current solution is to try to crosspost between my home server and the largest server with that topic where applicable.
My idea for Lemmy is possibly to assign tags at the community level (or maybe post level), so that a user can look at combined page that puts together all communities on federated servers with that tag. This could function similar to a Mastodon hashtag, and any smaller niche community that want to appear on more general servers (e.g. a Minecraft community could also want to be on #gaming. So beehaw.org/c/#gaming would combine gaming@beehaw.org, gaming@lemmy.ml, ttrpg communities and perhaps mastodon posts with #gaming tags. #tech could include privacy, foss, and similar. Kind of an idea spitball but I think it will help solve the fragmentation problem while still allowing community managers to decide which broader categories they associate with.
Will there be votes, based on what people want, or will it just be up the admins to create new communities on this instance?
for the time being our method will likely be taking suggestions every now and then on the site, and then refining the priority/order in which those communities are made based on observations of how often the topic comes up on site and how many people say they'll use it. in this case that refining is taking place on our chat communities, but that's mostly because:
i don't know if loosely polling it in our chats will really be a standard part of the process after this round of creations
Also how niche should communities be? We have a technology community, should there be a PC building community or should it be left to other instances that already start more specific to then make the niche communities?
Going with the technology example maybe there's a specific technology instance and they have communities for PC building, raspberry pi, self hosting, hacking etc etc.
I guess the benefit of a distributed platform is that we don't have to repeat the work that another instance is doing as long as it is federated to us (with us? by us?)
Most recently there was a suggestion thread for new communities.
Personally, I don't think niche communities are worth building at a small scale because of the worry of splintering. If I wanted to make a Gravity Rush 2 community, I'd probably just make my own instance to do it lol.
That said, I think there are valid exceptions to a point. For example, a Fighting Game Community, uh, community, might be worth it because there's more than enough to fill up a community separate from general video games. Character guides, tournament threads, etc
It very much feels like the old forum days of the internet doesn't it?