I’ve seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
I’m pretty confident we’ll eventually see some form of voluntary synchronization between identical communities added to either the codebase or a popular client app. “Owning” an individual instance’s community will be worthless.
Im sure some of it is staking out territory, but I think a good chunk of it is just that modern reddit mindset. The mindset is that of course you cant have good gaming discussion on gaming you need to have truegaming, and games, and linux_gaming, and patientgamers, and etc. The thing is you can and things are small enough on all instances even lemmy.ml and beehaw that you can talk about it in one place.
The reason reddit had so many is that it would rapidly homogenise into giant echo chambers with minimal community. Minority perspectives were supressed or drowned out by lurker voting.
New subs were being made to recapture giant subs’ original intentions, or specialise, yo put minority perspectives of the Hot page and curate a community as a result.
Lemmy isn’t big enough to homogenise like that, at least not yet.
I’m personally kind of hoping that the existence of smaller instances and multiple same-niche communities on Lemmy provides a way to avoid that phenomenon. Like, it’ll probably happen to communities on the Big Instances, I imagine, but on the more limited ones… maybe not?
I’ve seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
Good thing this is pretty pointless, since I can have the same community name in another instance.
I’m pretty confident we’ll eventually see some form of voluntary synchronization between identical communities added to either the codebase or a popular client app. “Owning” an individual instance’s community will be worthless.
(Wish I had the !remindme bot right now)
Im sure some of it is staking out territory, but I think a good chunk of it is just that modern reddit mindset. The mindset is that of course you cant have good gaming discussion on gaming you need to have truegaming, and games, and linux_gaming, and patientgamers, and etc. The thing is you can and things are small enough on all instances even lemmy.ml and beehaw that you can talk about it in one place.
The reason reddit had so many is that it would rapidly homogenise into giant echo chambers with minimal community. Minority perspectives were supressed or drowned out by lurker voting.
New subs were being made to recapture giant subs’ original intentions, or specialise, yo put minority perspectives of the Hot page and curate a community as a result.
Lemmy isn’t big enough to homogenise like that, at least not yet.
I’m personally kind of hoping that the existence of smaller instances and multiple same-niche communities on Lemmy provides a way to avoid that phenomenon. Like, it’ll probably happen to communities on the Big Instances, I imagine, but on the more limited ones… maybe not?