When information is cheap, attention is expensive · Raphael Lullis
raphael.lullis.net

I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

  • underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    3 hours ago

    New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

    I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

    Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.

      Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

      the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

      There are two different, orthogonal issues here:

      1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
      2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

      The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

      People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.

      Not my experience. A few examples:

      • No one complained about the mods from [email protected], yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
      • Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
      • Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.