Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

Resources:

https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
[email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
[email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)

Megathreads:

How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)

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"You should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around." In other words, start from generalist communities, and create more specialized ones when there is a need. Do you agree? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Back with newsgroups the general rule was to go from general to specific. You start with a general discussion group and when discussions about video games get annoying you create a games group. If then there are too many Baldur’s Gate discussions you create BG. If they are dominated by Baldur’s Gate 3 you create a Baldur’s Gate 3 group. If everyone is fawning over Withers you create a Withers group which of course will be flooded with discussion about the Withers’ tits mod, which shall get its own group.

Meaning you should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

I think it's a discussion with having, but I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to it. I think as a default, it's probably a good idea. Don't create more specific communities when more general ones will work.

As an example, Reddit has /r/Brisbane, /r/movingtobrisbane, and /r/brisbanetrains. But there's only [email protected] (there's also a trains one, but it's dead and irrelevant for these purposes, IMO), and I think this is for the best. Anyone interested in the more specific content can easily go to the more general community, and there's likely to be at least a passing interest in that anyway.

But there are times when a more general community is inappropriate, because the audience for one of the specific parts is not interested at all in the other specific parts.

And I think your BG3 example is a good one of the latter. A general gaming community is not a good place for detailed discussions about a particular game, because most people in a general gaming community aren't interested in that. They're a good place for announcements about games and larger scale discussions about franchises, developments, and trends in gaming. But not about specific strategies, lore theorising, or patches of specific games.

If you can expect a majority of the audience for a particular Community to be uninterested in a significant amount of content, that's the sign that a more specific Community should be made, IMO.